The U.S. Supreme Court has sided with pesticide manufacturer Bayer in Monsanto Company v. Durnell, ruling that federal law preempts lawsuits brought by cancer patients who allege its Roundup product was to blame for their disease.
According to Food and Water Watch the ruling extends the legal shield to all pesticide corporations, leaving patients harmed by toxic agricultural chemicals without the recourse of litigation that has cost Bayer billions of dollars.
Roundup was created by Monsanto in the 1970s and is one of the most popular weedkillers in the world. Concerns over glyphosate, a chemical that is absorbed by plants, traveling into their roots and blocking an enzyme used for their growth, have prompted one of the biggest waves of class-action lawsuits in U.S. history.
In response to the Supreme Court’s action, Food & Water Watch Legal Director Tarah Heinzen said the ruling is a disaster for public health.
“Once again, the Supreme Court has sided with big business over people and the environment. Today’s ruling is a disaster for public health — and it has Trump’s name written all over it,” Heinzen said.
“If one needed any further proof that the president’s feigned mission to ‘Make America Healthy Again’ was a farce, today’s decision is all the evidence needed. Trump has been all too willing to endorse Bayer’s crusade to pollute with impunity, while the administration doubles down on a failed pesticide regulatory scheme.
“Industrial agriculture is poisoning America. The fight against toxic pesticides does not end here. Congress must pass the Pesticide Injury Accountability Act to safeguard access to justice for all harmed by these toxic chemicals, and a Farm Bill that finally puts public health first. Until then, the Supreme Court has shut the courthouse doors to tens of thousands of sick and suffering Americans.”
The court ruling comes despite evidence suggesting that glyphosate, the key ingredient in Bayer’s Roundup pesticide, is carcinogenic, and that the Environmental Protection Agency’s pesticide registration process is fatally flawed. The World Health Organization has defined glyphosate as a probable carcinogen since 2015. Roundup is the most widely used pesticide in the United States.
The decision completes Bayer’s years-long quest to stifle cancer lawsuits cutting into its bottom line. Since purchasing Monsanto in 2018, Bayer has spent more than $11 billion settling over 100,000 cancer lawsuits related to Roundup.
The Center for Food Safety, a legal nonprofit working on food and agriculture issues in the U.S., filed a brief to the Supreme Court in the case on behalf of a broad array of nonprofit public interest stakeholders representing famers, farmworkers, medical professionals, consumer protection advocates, and conservationists.
"Overturning decades of well-settled law, today the Supreme Court eliminated one way the public held pesticide corporations accountable for their products’ harms," said George Kimbrell, Legal Director at the Center for Food Safety.
"But the fight is far from over. EPA’s regulation of pesticides just became all the more vital to protecting the public health and public interest. We will continue to hold EPA accountable when it does not. And states and other governing bodies have other robust roles. The Roundup cancer cases are a telling sign that people are fed up with corporations poisoning their health and environment and want to choose a different future for their food. This decision, while tragic, is a clarion, galvanizing call to continued action: Americans need to continue speaking truth to power and demand their representatives are protecting their health, not corporations’ profit margins."
Food and Water Watch says Bayer has been pushing widely-opposed Cancer Gag Act bills nationwide, seeking to shield pesticide corporations from health-related lawsuits in multiple states and Congress. So far this year, the immunity legislation has failed in 11 states and was stripped from the House Farm Bill and left out of the Senate version.
Leaders of other public health watchdog groups also spoke out against the ruling.
Zen Honeycutt, founder of Moms Across America and an advocate for the MAHA movement, issued a public statement on Thursday calling the ruling “worse than treason” and said it reflected a betrayal of President Trump’s promises to the MAHA movement. “It really is chemical warfare on the American people,” she said.
In a separate statement, Alex Clark, a leading voice in the MAHA movement and a supporter of Trump, posted on X, “For an administration that promised to take on corporate capture and Make America Healthy Again, this is a stunning betrayal. Farmers, families, and cancer patients currently in litigation with Bayer will never forget this.”
U.S. Senator Cory Booker, D-NJ, said the Supreme Court decision was corrupt. “Today's a really a grievous day where the people of the United States saw that their Supreme Court corrupted by massive gifts from billionaires and people of interest in matters before them. A court that takes gifts, from RVs to tuition to lavish gifts, sided with the wealthy, powerful multinational corporation reversing years and years of precedent, dismissing ultimately effectively hundreds and hundreds, in fact 1000s of cases. They sided with the big multinational corporations against the people.
Shaughnessy Naughton, 314 Action President, said the High Court’s ruling handed chemical manufacturers a “get out of jail free card” when working with chemicals and the nation’s food supply. “This decision throws out over 100,000 lawsuits and really puts poison and politics over patients. It's a major setback for the MAHA movement, and that's exactly what the Trump administration was asking for. RFK Jr was also quick to endorse it. I think it’s important to call out what a betrayal of the MAHA movement this is. RFK Jr. built his reputation suing Monsanto on behalf of patients who may have cancer from their product and promised to ban glyphosate. He didn't do that, and he's not doing anything to change the direction of how we use this in our food production. It’s a big win for chemical manufacturers, and real loss for farmers and the American people that should have their day in court.”
Kayla Hancock, Director of Protect Our Care’s Public Health Project, said the move supports the new views of Health and Human Secretary Robert F. Kennedy. “It's shocking how carelessly our nation's health secretary RFK Jr., who spent decades fighting against the use of this very chemical, and this company has essentially bowed down to the pro-pollution and corporate agenda of the Trump administration and has defended this decision to put more Americans at risk, while abandoning the cancer survivors that are now denied a pathway to damages for injuries.”
David Murphy, founder of United We Eat and former finance director for Kennedy’s presidential campaign, also said the ruling would jeopardize the health of Americans. “For decades, Republicans have preached about the importance of states’ rights and ‘pro-life values,’ but today’s ruling in favor of Bayer-Monsanto’s right to shield themselves from cancer lawsuits is more proof that this is just empty rhetoric from a morally bankrupt party and a Supreme Court that continues to put corporate profits over the health of Americans.”
