THE Supreme Court in a 7-2 decision Thursday, said Bayer cannot be sued over state-level allegations that company failed to warn of cancer risks from its weedkiller Summary and its chemical glyphosate.
The ruling is a major victory for Bayer and the Trump administration, which argued that the failure to warn allegations were preempted by a federal law governing pesticides. It is also a hard blow for Making America Healthy Again movement, which helped bring Trump back to the White House in the 2024 election but felt betrayed by the administration’s embrace of glyphosate — the weedkiller most commonly used in agriculture and which has long been linked to cancer claims.
Monsanto Co’s Roundup is displayed for sale in Encinitas, California.
Mike Blake | Reuters
Justice Brett Kavanaugh wrote for the majority, arguing that because the Environmental Protection Agency considers glyphosate safe when used properly and has not required a cancer warning label, the federal Insecticide, Fungicide, and Rodenticide Act preempts the state’s failure to warn of claims.
“When it comes to pesticide labels, FIFRA requires”[u]“uniformity” and expressly preempts state labeling requirements that are “in addition to” or “different from” federal labeling requirements,” Kavanaugh wrote. “And as a matter of law, state tort law cannot impose labeling requirements ‘in addition to’ or ‘different from’ the federal requirements imposed by FIFRA.
Read more about CNBC’s politics coverageBayer celebrated the move Thursday, saying it is “good for science, farmers and industries that depend on regulatory clarity for innovation.”
“This should help significantly contain the Roundup litigation after nearly a decade of legal battles. The decision is expected to result in the dismissal of current claims based on warnings and the barring of future claims for failure to warn,” the company, which bought Roundup maker Monsanto in 2018, said in a statement.
The company’s shares rose 15.75% to $13.09 following the decision.
The case centered on the failure to warn a man, John Durnell, who said his cancer was caused by repeated exposure to glyphosate. Durnell was awarded more than $1 million by a Missouri jury in 2019, after the court ruled that Bayer failed to warn of cancer risks. A Missouri appeals court upheld the ruling, which the Supreme Court overturned and remanded on Thursday.
But the court’s decision will likely go well beyond Durnell’s case alone, with a torrent of failure-to-warn claims against Bayer over Roundup’s alleged cancer risk now under legal threat.
MAHA leader and now Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. previously won a similar lawsuit for a man in 2018 who claimed Monsanto failed to warn of the cancer risk posed by glyphosate.
The court’s decision could have political consequences for the Trump administration, as seen by MAHA activists who supported the president Donald Trump after Kennedy abandoned his independent bid for the presidency and supported the current president.
“Today’s SCOTUS decision is historic. Never in history has an administration so blatantly and willfully sold out our fertility, vitality, and health to corporate interests,” wrote MAHA advocate Kelly Ryerson. on. She goes by the online nickname “Glyphosate Girl”.
“This is unforgivable. We will ensure that all voters know exactly how this domestic chemical attack occurred,” Ryerson wrote.
The Department of Health and Human Services did not immediately respond to a request for comment from Kennedy.
In 2015, the World Health Organization’s International Agency for Research on Cancer found that glyphosate was “probably carcinogenic to humans.” The United States EPA has never required such a label.
Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson dissented from the court’s decision, joined by Justice Neil Gorsuch.
“In so ruling, the Court departs from the near-unanimous view of the many state and federal courts that have rejected this preemption argument. In my view, the majority should have joined this chorus,” she wrote.
“Durnell’s failure to warn claim is not ‘additional to or different from’ FIFRA’s mandates; it is equivalent to FIFRA’s key labeling requirement – the prohibition of misbranding,” she wrote.
— CNBC’s Luke Fountain contributed to this report.
