A Philadelphia court’s jury ordered Bayer AG to pay $2.25 billion in damages to a Pennsylvania man, who claimed to have developed cancer after allegedly using the company’s weedkiller, Roundup.
The plaintiff John McKivison claimed in the lawsuit that after using Roundup on his property for 20 years, he was diagnosed with non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma.
On Friday, the jury unanimously stated in the verdict that Roundup was a cancer-causing product and also found that Monsanto, a subsidiary of Bayer, failed to warn its customers about the complications of the weedkiller.
McKivison’s lawyers commented, “The jury’s punitive damages award sends a clear message that this multi-national corporation needs top to bottom change.”
Bayer responded by calling the verdict “unconstitutionally excessive damages” and said that the jury’s verdict “conflicts with the overwhelming weight of scientific evidence and worldwide regulatory and scientific assessments” on Roundup.
Roundup is based on the ingredient glyphosate which was introduced by Monsanto in 1974.
In 2020, The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency found that “there are no risks of concern to human health when glyphosate is used in accordance with its current label” and that “glyphosate is unlikely to be a human carcinogen.”
The European Commission and Health Canada’s Pest Management Regulatory Agency had also approved its usage citing there is no evidence that linked glyphosate to being carcinogenic.
However, in 2015, the World Health Organization’s International Agency for Research on Cancer found that glyphosate is “probably carcinogenic to humans.”
In 2020, Bayer had paid around $10 billion in settlement of many Roundup cases.