Bayer’s Roundup will have to pay a Pennsylvania man $2.25 billion who claimed he got cancer from using the product for over twenty years.
The jury awarded John McKivison, 49, $2 billion in punitive damages after he was diagnosed with non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma.
McKivison’s lawyers, Tom Kline and Jason Itkin sued the Monsanto Company, owned by Bayer, saying, “The jury’s unanimous verdict was a condemnation of 50 years of misconduct by Monsanto and a declaration that its misconduct was in reckless disregard of human safety and a substantial cause of John McKivison’s cancer.” They added that Roundup “is a defective cancer-causing product, that Monsanto was negligent, and that Monsanto failed to warn about the dangers” of the weed killer.
Bayer said in a statement, “While we have great sympathy for the plaintiff in this case, we are confident that our products can be used safely and are not carcinogenic, consistent with the assessments of expert regulators worldwide.”
In 2020, the US Environmental Protection Agency said it found, “no risks of concern to human health when glyphosate is used in accordance with its current label” and that the chemical is “unlikely to be a human carcinogen.
Last year, the European Commission also determined there was “no evidence to classify glyphosate as being carcinogenic.”
Bayer will appeal the verdict and feels it will get the “unconstitutionally excessive damage award eliminated or reduced.”
By - FZ
