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A federal judge on Monday had harsh words for Bayer AG’s plan to delay potential future Roundup cancer lawsuits and block jury trials, criticizing the highly unusual proposal crafted by Bayer and a small group of plaintiffs’ attorneys as potentially unconstitutional.
The “Court is skeptical of the propriety and fairness of the proposed settlement, and is tentatively inclined to deny the motion,” reads the preliminary order issued by Judge Vince Chhabria of the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California. The judge’s position appears to be a sharp blow to Bayer and the company’s efforts to resolve a legacy of litigation attached to Monsanto, which Bayer bought two years ago.
In 2016, Christine Sheppard traveled to The Hague, Netherlands, to testify before the Monsanto Tribunal (which Organic Consumers Association helped organize).
Sheppard told the panel of lawyers and judges she believed Monsanto’s Roundup weedkiller had caused her life-destroying non-Hodgkin lymphoma. She later joined tens of thousands of cancer victims who sued Monsanto (now owned by Bayer).
Last week, Bayer settled most of those lawsuits, for a staggering $10 billion.
Sheppard, whose story began in 1995, on a farm in Hawaii that she and her husband were forced to sell after her cancer diagnosis, called the settlement a “slap in the face.” As she wrote this week in the Guardian:
“Bayer admitted no guilt, will continue to sell Roundup, and refused to label it as carcinogenic. People will continue to get cancer from it.”
$10 billion is a lot of money to have to pay out to victims of a product Bayer insists is “safe.” We can probably count that as a win.
Bayer CEO Werner Baumann was euphoric back in 2016 when he landed one of the biggest takeover in the agribusiness by acquiring Monsanto. But he could have known better at a time when it was already emerging that Bayer would inherit a time bomb with the acquisition of its US rival.
Last Wednesday was my 71st birthday, a low-key celebration in these Covid-19 times. Then I heard the news that the pharmaceutical conglomerate Bayer has offered a settlement to resolve several massive class-action lawsuits alleging that the company’s herbicide, Roundup, is dangerous and causes cancer.
A plan to delay any new Roundup cancer claims for years and shift the key question of whether or not the weed killer causes cancer from a jury to a hand-picked panel of scientists faces potential opposition from some of the plaintiffs’ attorneys who initiated and led the mass tort claims against Roundup maker Monsanto, sources close to the litigation said.
Bayer, the world’s largest seed and pesticide maker, has agreed to pay more than $10 billion to settle tens of thousands of claims in the United States that its popular weedkiller Roundup causes cancer, the company said Wednesday.
A federal judge in California has blocked efforts by the state to require cancer warning labels on Bayer-Monsanto’s signature weedkiller, Roundup. Glyphosate, the active ingredient in Roundup, is the most widely used herbicide in the world. In 2015, it was classified as “probably carcinogenic” to people by the International Agency for Research on Cancer, or IARC.
A Virginia lawyer who helped represent the first Roundup cancer plaintiff to take Monsanto to trial pleaded guilty on Friday to trying to extort $200 million from a chemical compound supplier to Monsanto.
Timothy Litzenburg, 38, admitted to a scheme in which he and another lawyer threatened to inflict substantial “financial and reputational harm” on the supplier unless that company paid the two attorneys $200 million disguised as a “consulting agreement.”
Bayer AG said on Tuesday it will scrap a nearly $1 billion project to produce the chemical dicamba in the United States, but said the move is unrelated to a federal court decision that blocked sales of weed killers based on the product.
During the ongoing impacts of the pandemic, economic uncertainty, and unequal access to healthy food, we need more integrity and safety in our food supply, not less. Whenever there are job losses and lack of insurance many families are less likely to call an ambulance or get hospital care during a food allergy reaction, increasing the risk of death.
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