Questionable science continues to drive lawsuits against the weed-killer Roundup and other consumer products, placing multibillion-dollar financial burdens on companies and also hampering innovation and placing strains on taxpayers.
That’s the conclusion of officials at the Taxpayers Protection Alliance (TPA), which has been monitoring how “junk science” fueled trial-attorney litigation against companies such as Bayer, the parent company of Monsanto. A unit of the taxpayer-supported World Health Organization (WHO) has made “alarmist” warnings and advanced a debatable link between Monsanto’s Roundup weed killer and a form of cancer, according to Dan Savickas, the TPA’s director of policy.
“As a case in point, one of the things that shows (the WHO’s questionable science) is how they have hot dogs in the same level of cancer risk as cigarettes,” Savickas told the St. Louis Record. “Bacon as well is in that same category. The WHO is frequently alarmist on a lot of things. We singled out how their alarmism and over-caution in the case of Roundup has been fuel for ambulance-chasing attorneys here in the United States, kicking off a wave of class-action lawsuits.”
In 2020, Monsanto reached an $11 billion settlement in nearly 100,000 Roundup lawsuits filed nationwide. Many of these cases allege a link between the Roundup ingredient glyphosate and non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma, according to the law firm Miller & Zois LLC. Monsanto now estimates that an additional 54,000 Roundup lawsuits remain, most of which were filed in state courts, the law firm reported.
The Roundup litigation has also been intertwined with multibillion-dollar legal advertising buys nationwide and allegations of venue shopping, critics of the litigation say. Last month, the Missouri Supreme Court heard oral arguments over lawsuits filed in St. Louis Circuit Court and whether that venue was reasonable when the plaintiffs’ exposure to the glyphosate occurred outside of Missouri.
“It all filters down to taxpayers,” Savickas said of the associated costs of the Roundup litigation. The nation’s tort system cost the U.S. economy $443 billion in 2020, representing 2% of the U.S. gross national product, according to a recent opinion column authored by David Williams, the TPA’s president.
When edicts come down from the WHO about cancer links, companies in the food and health sectors may become risk-averse and decide not to pursue research into beneficial products, potentially hurting patients and consumers in general, he said.
“In the long run, you’ll see a lot of lost innovation and economic growth,” Savickas said.
And once a precedent is established in one court that’s based on questionable scientific assumptions, there’s a risk that other courts will follow suit, he said.
“Cases based on faulty assumptions generate large settlements,” Savickas said. “A lot of these things will generate large revenues for frivolous litigators. … They pour fuel on the fire. There are no disincentives for attorneys not to go forward.”
Solutions to the problem are multifold, he said. More oversight is needed at the federal level to reassess the nation’s role in WHO, and courts need to make sure that studies used to support different parties’ interests are peer-reviewed, are not cherry-picked and reflect rigorous, holistic assessments, according to Savickas.
Even so, the validity of the science underpinning mass tort filings against manufacturers does not always matter, according to Williams’ recent opinion article.
“They often attempt to gain settlements from companies based more on the volume of lawsuits and plaintiffs than scientific fact,” he said. “Facing thousands of claimants and reams of bad press, it is not uncommon for blameless companies to throw up their hands and settle rather than going to court. This is hardly a system of justice.”
Environmental agencies in the European Union and multiple countries – including the United States, Canada, Brazil, Australia and Japan – have found no credible evidence that Roundup is linked to cancer, according to the American Tort Reform Association.