Second Jury Trial Implicates Roundup in Lymphatic Cancer by Dr. Joseph Mercola for Mecola
GNN Note – With the imminent collapse of the Round-Up brand, now owned by Bayer, what impact will that have on this global pharmaceutical giant?
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August 10, 2018, a jury ruled in favor of plaintiff Dewayne Johnson in a truly historic case against Monsanto1 (now owned by Bayer AG2,3). Johnson — the first of several thousand pending legal cases — claimed Monsanto’s herbicide Roundup caused his Non-Hodgkin lymphoma.
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Forty-six-year-old Johnson sprayed about 150 gallons of Roundup 20 to 40 times per year while working as a groundskeeper for the Benicia school district in California, from 2012 through late 2015.4His lawsuit, filed in 2016 after he became too ill to work, accused Monsanto of hiding the health hazards of Roundup.
According to the ruling, Monsanto “acted with malice or oppression” and was responsible for “negligent failure” by not warning consumers about the carcinogenicity of this pernicious weed killer.5The jury ordered Monsanto to pay $289 million in damages to Johnson. A judge upheld the guilty verdict, but reduced the damages to $78 million.6,7,8 Bayer/Monsanto has filed an appeal.
Jury Decision: Roundup ‘Guilty’ of Causing Cancer in Second Trial
March 19, 2019, a U.S. jury ruled Roundup was a substantial causative factor in the cancer of a second plaintiff, Edwin Hardeman.9,10 In the second liability phase of the trial, jurors will decide whether Bayer/Monsanto acted with negligence and should pay damages.
Hardeman’s attorney, Jennifer Moore, said they were “very pleased that the jury unanimously held that the Roundup caused the Non-Hodgkin lymphoma.” Immediately, Bayer stock plummeted by 12.5 percent, the largest intraday loss in 16 years, according to Reuters,11 wiping out a cool $9.1 billion of the company’s value in one fell swoop.
Since August 2018, Bayer’s shares have fallen by more than a third, wiping out about $28.2 billion of the company’s market value.12 And, according to Financial Times,13 “As they contemplate the ever-growing list of glyphosate cases pending in U.S. courts — 11,200 at the latest count14 — investors have every reason to feel glum.”
The second phase of the trial will determine whether the jury finds Bayer/Monsanto responsible for damages. While Bayer believes the jury in this case will find the company acted appropriately and therefore not liable for damages, chances are Hardeman’s jury will be as convinced and outraged by the evidence as Johnson’s was.
In Johnson’s case, the evidence presented included email correspondence and corporate documents that created a comprehensive narrative of corporate malfeasance and collusion with U.S. regulatory agencies.
You can review many of these “Monsanto Papers” on the U.S. Right to Know website.15 Key documents in the Hardeman case are also available there.16 Some of the evidence against Monsanto is also summarized in “Spinning Science & Silencing Scientists: A Case Study in How the Chemical Industry Attempts to Influence Science”17 — a minority staff report dated February 2018, prepared for U.S. House members of the Committee on Science, Space and Technology.
In “The Monsanto Papers: Poisoning the Scientific Well,”18 a paper published in The International Journal of Risk & Safety in Medicine, June 2018, Leemon McHenry describes the importance of this cache of documents:
“The documents reveal Monsanto-sponsored ghostwriting of articles published in toxicology journals and the lay media, interference in the peer review process, behind-the-scenes influence on retraction and the creation of a so-called academic website as a front for the defense of Monsanto products …
The use of third-party academics in the corporate defense of glyphosate reveals that this practice extends beyond the corruption of medicine and persists in spite of efforts to enforce transparency in industry manipulation.”
Scientific Evidence Against Glyphosate-Based Herbicides Keeps Growing
Considering the evidence mounting against Roundup and other glyphosate-based herbicides, I think the chemical’s days are numbered. As previously discussed in many articles, glyphosate and glyphosate-based weed killer formulations have in recent years been linked to a wide variety of human health consequences, including:
