Last week, Bayer was ordered to pay $2.25 billion to a Pennsylvania man who said he developed cancer from exposure to the company's Roundup weedkiller, the man's attorneys said.
A jury in the Philadelphia Court of Common Pleas found that John McKivision's non-Hodgkins lymphoma was the result of using Roundup for yard work at his house for a period of several years. The verdict includes $2 billion in punitive damages and $250 million in compensatory damages.
"The jury's punitive damages award sends a clear message that this multi-national corporation needs top to bottom change," Tom Kline and Jason Itkin, McKivision's attorneys, said in a joint statement.
Bayer in a statement said it disagreed "with the jury's adverse verdict that conflicts with the overwhelming weight of scientific evidence and worldwide regulatory and scientific assessments, and believe that we have strong arguments on appeal to get this verdict overturned and the unconstitutionally excessive damage award eliminated or reduced."
Bayer has said that decades of studies have shown Roundup and its active ingredient, glyphosate, are safe for human use. Last year, the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco said it was unconstitutional for California to require Bayer to include a warning label for glyphosate.
The verdict comes after five other recent wins late last year by plaintiffs suing Bayer over Roundup, though the company won the most recent such trial in December, as well as a string of earlier trials. In total, Bayer has won 10 of the last 16 Roundup trials.
There have been roughly 165,000 claims made in the U.S. against the company for personal injuries allegedly caused by Roundup, which Bayer acquired as part of its $63 billion purchase of U.S. agrochemical company Monsanto in 2018. Most plaintiffs, like McKivision, allege that the product caused them to develop non-Hodgkins lymphoma.
Information and lawsuit story sourced from Reuters.
