A U.S. appeals court on Monday refused to dismiss a Georgia doctor’s lawsuit claiming that Bayer AG’s Roundup weedkiller caused cancer, the latest setback in the German company’s efforts to fend off thousands of similar cases carrying potentially billions of dollars in liability.
A three-judge panel of the Atlanta-based 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals rejected Bayer’s argument that federal regulators’ approval of Roundup shielded the company from being sued under state law for failing to warn consumers of the product’s risks. Several other appeals courts had previously reached the same conclusion in similar lawsuits.
If the 11th Circuit had broken with those other courts, it would have made it more likely for the U.S. Supreme Court to take up the issue. Bayer has said that it hopes a favorable Supreme Court ruling could limit its liability from the Roundup-related litigation, but the court has so far rebuffed its appeals.
I don’t care about the companies involved, but I do care about misinformation and pseudoscience being spread about known biochemistry and toxicology for a personal motive. Glyphosate is used in a wide variety of scientific fields that have nothing to do with agriculture and these lawsuits don’t even attempt to prove the claims of cancer.
They are entirely emotion-based jury decisions with the plaintiffs’ lawyers going that route, rather than trying to provide scientific evidence for the claimed harm.
That’s what happens when you have this type of system. It’s not efficient, but better to stop it when it’s harming the consumer, imo.