Supreme Court rejects appeal from Roundup maker over cancer claims
In a statement Tuesday, the company said that it disagrees with the court’s decision not to take its appeal and “is confident that the extensive body of science and consistently favorable views of leading regulatory bodies worldwide provide a strong foundation on which it can successfully defend Roundup in court when necessary.”
The case was brought by Edwin Hardeman, who was diagnosed in 2015 with non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma. He sued the company, alleging that his use of Roundup for more than two decades had caused his cancer. He said the company had failed to warn of the cancer risks associated with the active ingredient glyphosate.
“This has been a long, hard-fought journey to bring justice for Mr. Hardeman and now thousands of other cancer victims can continue to hold Monsanto accountable for its decades of corporate malfeasance,” Hardeman’s lawyers Jennifer Moore and Aimee Wagstaff said in a statement referring to the herbicide’s original producer, 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 more stringent. After an international research group classified glyphosate as “probably carcinogenic to humans” in 2015, the state required a warning label for glyphosate-based pesticides. The classification prompted a spate of lawsuits against the manufacturer of the nation’s most widely used weed killer.
An appeals court upheld a jury’s $25 million verdict and finding that Hardeman’s exposure to Roundup was a “substantial factor” in his cancer and that the company had failed to warn of the risks.
The U.S. Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit said federal law does not preempt the company’s duty to include a cancer warning on its label. The court said that a pesticide can be “misbranded” even if the EPA has approved its label and that a company can comply with both federal and state labeling requirements.
The company’s lawyers urged the Supreme Court to reverse and pointed to previous rulings intended to ensure “nationwide uniformity of pesticide labeling.” California and potentially 49 other states should not be able to “marginalize” EPA’s statements that glyphosate is unlikely to cause cancer, they said.
The company noted that Hardeman stopped using Roundup in 2012, before the California label requirement.
In 2020, Bayer agreed to pay more than $10 billion to settle tens of thousands of potential U.S. claims. The company said that the settlement was not an admission of wrongdoing and noted in its statement Tuesday that it had won its last four cases involving…
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