Arbitration court dismisses lawsuit by major homeopathic veterinary drug manufacturer against Russian Academy of Sciences

The Moscow Arbitration Court has dismissed a lawsuit by AlexAnn, one of Russia’s biggest manufacturers of homeopathic veterinary drugs. The company claimed that a February 2017 memorandum published by the Russian Academy of Sciences “on the pseudo-scientificity of homeopathy” has hurt its sales. AlexAnn demanded that the academy retract the memo and pay 30 million rubles ($474,000) in compensation for lost business.

The Russian Academy of Sciences argued that AlexAnn failed to provide evidence for the effectiveness of its homeopathic treatments and did not demonstrate that the memo caused a decline in sales. The memorandum, moreover, doesn’t represent the academy’s official position, and was merely issued as the opinion of several experts at the institution.

Russia’s National Council for Homeopathy criticized the February 2017 memo, calling it a hired attempt “to return us to the era of general prohibitions and nationwide condemnations.” Russia’s Health Ministry has created a working group to study the future of homeopathy, and State Duma deputies have drafted legislation that would ban advertisements for such treatments and require manufacturers to alert consumers that their products have no clinically proven medicinal properties.