(CN) — BayerAG will pay $10 billion to resolve a raft of litigation over its herbicides, including claims that its popular weed killer Roundup causes cancer.
The settlement will bring closure to an estimated 75% of claims filed by 125,000 people who attribute their non-Hodgkin lymphoma to Roundup use, as well as those who have hired attorneys but have not yet filed lawsuits.
The $10.1 billion deal is the fruit of more than a year of tough negotiations with dozens of law firms. It involves separate agreements with each firm, and clients will receive differing amounts.
The total figure devotes $8.8 to $9.6 billion to settle current litigation and any unresolved claims, and creates a separate class of future plaintiffs who have used Roundup and may develop some form of non-Hodgkin lymphoma in the years ahead, setting aside $1.25 billion to address their potential claims.
“I’m very pleased for my clients that after a very long and hard-fought battle that we can bring them some peace of mind for what they’ve been through,” attorney Jennifer Moore said by phone Wednesday. Moore, founding partner of Moore Law Group in Louisville, Kentucky, tried the first federal Roundup case in San Francisco last year.
The German pharmaceutical giant inherited the legal troubles of Roundup manufacturer Monsanto when it purchased the agrochemical company for $63 billion in 2018. As product liability lawsuits rose by the thousands, it faced mounting pressure to negotiate a settlement.
U.S. District Judge Vincent Chhabria, who oversaw hundreds of Roundup lawsuits as part of a federal multidistrict litigation (MDL), ordered the parties into private mediation in May 2019. He appointed Kenneth Feinberg, a mediator who famously administered the victims funds arising from the 9/11 World Trade Center attacks and the 2010 BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, to run the negotiations.
A portion of the $1.25 billion for prospective plaintiffs will be used to create a panel of experts who will determine whether Roundup is connected to non-Hodgkin lymphoma, and how much.
"The Class Science Panel will determine whether Roundup can cause non-Hodgkin lymphoma (NHL), and if so, at what minimum exposure levels,” Bayer said in a statement.
The panel’s work is expected to take years, and future class members — should Chhabria approve the $1.25 billion — will not be able to proceed with claims against Roundup or seek punitive damages until the panel makes its determination.
Should the panel find no causal connection, class members will not be able to claim otherwise in subsequent lawsuits against Bayer. The same goes for the opposite conclusion — if the panel does find a link, Bayer will not be able to argue differently.
The World Health Organization’s International Agency for Research on Cancer deemed glyphosate, the active ingredient in Roundup, a probable human carcinogen in a report released in 2015, a declaration that fanned the flames of debate over Roundup’s safety. Monsanto condemned the IARC report, pointing to regulatory bodies in the United States, Canada, the European Union, Japan, and Australia that reached a contrasting determination on glyphosate.
Monsanto, now Bayer, has clung to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s multiple determinations that glyphosate poses no risks to humans, and on Monday, U.S. District Judge William Shubb in Sacramento ruled it would be misleading for Bayer to put a cancer warning label on bottles of Roundup sold in California given scant scientific evidence pointing to its carcinogenicity.
While Bayer has been holding out for a win in court, it had thus far suffered three staggering losses in pivotal bellwether cases over whether glyphosate caused consumers to develop non-Hodgkin lymphoma.
In the first, a San Francisco jury in 2018 awarded Bay Area groundskeeper Dewayne Johnson $289 million, after finding glyphosate likely caused his cancer and that Monsanto deliberately failed to warn the public about the risk. That verdict was reduced to $78.5 million by a trial judge.