The Supreme Court on Tuesday upheld a multimillion-dollar verdict against the maker of the popular herbicide Roundup for failing to warn of cancer risks. The judges’ decision not to intervene paves the way for thousands of similar lawsuits against Bayer. The Biden administration had urged the court to reject the company’s request, a departure from the Trump administration. In a statement on Tuesday, the company said it disagreed with the court’s decision not to appeal and “is convinced that the extensive scientific body and consistently favorable views of the world’s top regulators provide a strong basis on which to defend Roundup success in court when needed “. The case was brought by Edwin Hardeman, who was diagnosed in 2015 with non-Hodgkin lymphoma. He sued the company, claiming that using Roundup for more than two decades had caused him cancer. He said the company had failed to warn of the cancer risks associated with the active ingredient glyphosate. “This has been a long, arduous journey to bring justice to Mr. Hardemann, and now thousands of other cancer victims can continue to hold Monsanto accountable for decades of corporate abuse,” Hardemann’s lawyers, Jennifer Moore and Amy Wagstae said. statement. referring to the original producer of the herbicide, which was acquired by Bayer in 2018. The Environmental Protection Agency has repeatedly concluded that glyphosate is unlikely to cause cancer in humans. California’s labeling laws are stricter. After an international research team classified glyphosate as “potentially carcinogenic to humans” in 2015, the state demanded a warning label for glyphosate-based pesticides. The classification sparked a wave of lawsuits against the maker of the country’s most widely used herbicide. An appeals court upheld a jury’s $ 25 million verdict, finding that Hardeman’s report to Roundup was an “essential factor” in causing the cancer and that the company had not warned of the risks. Court rejects Trump-era EPA finding herbicide safe The U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit said federal law does not prejudge the company’s duty to include a cancer warning on its label. The court said a pesticide could be “misrepresented” even if the EPA had approved its label and that a company could comply with both federal and state labeling requirements. The company’s lawyers urged the Supreme Court to overturn and cited previous rulings aimed at ensuring “national uniformity of pesticide labeling”. California and possibly 49 other states should not be able to “marginalize” the EPA’s claims that glyphosate is unlikely to cause cancer, they said. The company noted that Hardeman stopped using Roundup in 2012, before claiming the label in California. In 2020, Bayer agreed to pay more than $ 10 billion to settle tens of thousands of potential U.S. claims. The company said the settlement was not a felony and said in a statement on Tuesday that it had won the last four Roundup cases. In addition, the company said it was moving away from glyphosate-based home lawn and garden products in the United States to alternative ingredients for “managing the risk of litigation in the United States rather than safety concerns.” Last week, a separate decision by the 9th Circuit ordered the EPA to reconsider its 2020 finding that glyphosate poses “no unwarranted risk to humans or the environment.” In a unanimous opinion, Judge Michelle Friedland wrote that the Trump-era finding was “not substantially supported” and did not meet the agency’s legal obligations to review the environmental impact. The opinion noted that the nationally used area of glyphosate is about three times the size of California.
