Bayer AG, the German company that owns the Roundup brand of glyphosate weed killer, will pay $9.6 billion to settle about 95,000 U.S. lawsuits alleging that the herbicide causes non-Hodgkins lymphoma, a form of cancer.
Roundup was developed by American chemical giant Monsanto, which Bayer bought for $63 billion in 2018.
An additional 30,000 Roundup-related lawsuits have been filed but are not part of the settlement.
Under the terms of the deal, Bayer will continue to sell Roundup without a health warning because the company insists that its product is safe and does not cause cancer. A federal judge also ruled that the evidence was insufficient to require a warning label.
Selling Roundup without a health warning label leaves the company open to possible future suits, especially since it has previously lost three jury trials that gave plaintiffs multimillion-dollar awards when the juries agreed that Roundup caused cancer.
In a July 2019 case, the judge ruled that “there was clear and convincing evidence” that Roundup’s maker “made efforts to impede, discourage, or distort scientific inquiry and the resulting science,” Smith said.
Bayer is creating a $1.25-billion reserve to settle future claims and will create a panel to investigate whether Roundup is carcinogenic and, if so, at what levels.
On 24 June, Bayer announced it would spend $400 million to settle claims related to dicamba, another Monsanto herbicide, and $820 million to handle suits related to polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs), a toxic chemical that has infiltrated public water supplies.
The suits have weighed on Bayer’s stock price, which has drifted down from around $30 two years ago to under $19 on 26 June.
TRENDPOST: Remember the big Climate Change trend, and how so many were so concerned about its implications before COVID Hysteri took center stage?
As Gerald Celente said during the height of it, “Climate Change, forget about it. With all the poisons, chemicals, pesticides, GMO, they are injecting into our food and the trillions of tons they are injecting into the earth, water and air, we’ll be dead before the climate changes.”
So, too, with the spreading of COVID Fear. While they freaked out the world on a virus that doesn’t win, place, or show compared to other viruses, flus, and diseases that have killed countless millions compared to the 500,000 dead from COVID-19 globally to date… NEVER mentioned by Presstitutes and politicians, who get advertising revenue and bribes – called campaign contributions by morons – how we are being killed by the chemical industry is forbidden.
