The Trump administration has urged the U.S. Supreme Court to address Bayer's bid to curtail thousands of lawsuits claiming Roundup weedkiller causes cancer.
In a brief filed at the court, U.S. Solicitor General D. John Sauer encouraged Bayer’s effort to limit the lawsuits and potentially avert billions of dollars in damages, saying the company was correct that the federal law governing pesticides preempts lawsuits that make claims over the products containing glyphosate under state law.
Bayer has asked the SCOTUS to hear its appeal of a lower court's decision to uphold a $1.25 million decision awarded by a St. Louis jury in which a plaintiff sued after being diagnosed with non-Hodgkin's lymphoma blamed on exposure to Roundup.
Bayer pharmaceutical and biotechnology company, which acquired Roundup as a part of the purchase of Monsanto in 2018, said studies have shown glyphosate to be safe for human use.
The German pharmaceutical and biotechnology company, which acquired Roundup as part of its $63 billion purchase of Monsanto in 2018, has said that decades of studies have shown Roundup and its active ingredient, glyphosate, are safe for human use.
According to Progressive Farmer, the U.S. Argued that when the EPA created specific labeling requirement when it determined that glyphosate is “not likely to be carcinogenic to humans, it has consistently approved Roundup labels without cancer warnings and prohibited Bayer from adding warnings without agency approval.
According to Bayer, it is time for the U.S. Legal system to establish that companies cannot be punished under state laws for complying with federal label requirements.
“Bayer said it was time for the U.S. legal system to ‘establish that companies cannot be punished under state laws’ for complying with federal label requirements,” Neeley reported.
After seven years of Roundup court cases in the U.S., Bayer continues to face about 67,000 claims from plaintiffs who allege Roundup caused their cancer. The company is considering whether to stop making glyphosate due to high settlements in lawsuits.
Bayer began replacing its glyphosate-based version of the product for residential users with a different formulation in 2022.
According to Bayer, the company has been struggling with a deal to deal with the current and projected caseload, noting it had already resolved more than 130,000 cases by settlement or having them thrown out.