About F%$#ing Time

A jury just issued a multi-million dollar verdict against Monsanto (Now Bayer) for cancer caused by its Roundup (glyphosate) herbicide:

Bayer shares plunged as much as 14 percent on Monday, losing about $14 billion in value, after newly acquired Monsanto was ordered to pay $289 million in damages in the first of possibly thousands of U.S. lawsuits over alleged links between a weedkiller and cancer.

After the verdict in favor of a California school groundskeeper with terminal cancer, Monsanto faces more than 5,000 similar lawsuits across the United States over claims it did not warn of the cancer risks of glyphosate-based weedkillers, including its Roundup brand.

Monsanto, bought by Bayer this year for $63 billion, said that it would appeal against the jury’s verdict in California, which is the latest episode in a long-running debate over claims that exposure to Roundup can cause cancer.

The case by plaintiff Dewayne Johnson, filed in 2016, was fast-tracked for trial due to the severity of his non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma, a cancer of the lymph system that he alleges was caused by Roundup and Ranger Pro, another Monsanto glyphosate herbicide.

“The jury’s verdict is at odds with the weight of scientific evidence, decades of real world experience and the conclusions of regulators around the world that all confirm glyphosate is safe and does not cause non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma,” Bayer said in a statement.

Ummm………the state of California declared glyphosate a likely carcinogen in 2015 in response to a report from the International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC), and the the, "Weight of scientific evidence," is an artifact of a decades long PR campaign, ghost writing OP/EDs, academic journal articles, and an large portions of an official report of the European food safety agency.

Monsanto is trying to sell its own PR efforts as a scientific consensus, and the jury did not buy it.