We talk a lot about Supreme Court decisions, here, mostly about how horrible they are: how they are chipping away at the wall separating Church and State, how they’re taking away women’s rights, how they’ve given Donald Trump permission to do whatever he wants, and on and on and on. But today I want to talk about a recent decision that is…good? Maybe? Sort of? Okay, it has one positive resulting effect and that’s better than all those previous rulings. I’m referring to last week’s 7-2 decision to overturn a previous jury’s award of $1.25 million to a Missouri man who claimed that he got blood cancer from using the weedkiller Roundup in his garden.
This is a huge win for Bayer, the multibillion dollar conglomerate that owns Roundup thanks to merging with Monsanto back in 2018. Not only do they save a cool million on that one lawsuit, but now they have a better position to dismiss a bunch of other cases brought against them by other people who claim that Roundup caused them harm.
Now, how could I possibly think there’s anything “good” about this decision? After all, Bayer is an actual evil company. They started out by trademarking and commercializing cheap and effective medication that everyone was already using, like aspirin. And heroin. Just to name a few examples. They moved on to producing the gas used by Nazis to murder millions of people, and then after the war they hired a bunch of Nazis to high level positions, including those who were convicted of war crimes, once they completed their prison sentences.
In the ‘80s, Bayer knowingly sold hemophilia medication tainted with HIV to patients in Asia and Latin America.
And then they merged with Monsanto, which was truly a match made in heaven considering that they had also participated in war crimes, by manufacturing Agent Orange. They were also responsible for DDT, and of course, Roundup. Roundup is a weedkiller that uses glyphosate, a compound that kills weeds but was originally thought to be harmless to animals, including humans.
However, over the years, people started to wonder if it truly was harmless, especially for the people most exposed to it on farms, and over the course of many years. This is an incredibly difficult thing to study, because farms use LOTS of various chemicals to grow food, like fertilizers and pesticides and other kinds of herbicides; further, a lot of farmworkers in the US do not have health insurance and aren’t likely to report ill effects, especially years later.
So, researchers have tried a variety of studies to figure out whether there’s any connection between glyphosate and human health problems like cancer: they look at what data they have for farmworkers and compare them to the general population, or workers at farms that use glyphosate versus those at farms that don’t use glyphosate. Those studies tend to not find much to worry about, like this study of more than 54,000 pesticide applicators, 45,000 of whom worked with glyphosate, found no statistically significant link between glyphosate and any kind of cancer. Other studies have found weak links with certain types of cancer, like non-Hodgkins lymphoma, but with no ability to evaluate causation.
Studies on non-human animals exposed to glyphosate also don’t show much to be freaked out about. Some seem to show glyphosate causing tumors to grow in certain rodents, which is ultimately what led the International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC) to label the chemical as “probably carcinogenic to humans,” but other researchers note that this is within the statistical probability for those rodents and can’t be extrapolated to humans.
The Environmental Protection Agency, or EPA, here in the US has always leaned more on those human studies, and allowed products to be sold with glyphosate as it was assumed safe for people. Individual states can have their own regulations, though, so here in California it IS considered a potential carcinogen. Everything causes cancer here in California. But in 2022, the EPA officially agreed that California was authorized to require a warning label. Put a pin in that because it’s important.
So, right now, the research really just isn’t clear, and you can reasonably take away two very different but still not paradoxical opinions from it: there is no strong evidence that glyphosate is harmful to humans in the way it is currently used, and there is a chance that more and better studies will turn up the evidence that shows it is harmful to humans.
Despite the lack of scientific evidence, courts have ruled in favor of people who claim that Roundup caused their cancer, because courts have a very different way of establishing what is “true” and what is not.
So, did the extremely conservative Supreme Court of the United States suddenly discover a love of scientific inquiry, overturning the case against Bayer because there simply isn’t enough scientific evidence to suggest they were actually at fault? No, of course not. Did you just get here? Where have you been?
No, they overturned the previous ruling because the man sued Bayer in a state-level court, but Bayer is bound by the federal-level EPA labeling requirements, and the EPA determined Roundup is safe, and thus adding a cancer warning to the label would violate that federal agency’s finding.
Now, is this a “good” ruling, as I hemmed and hawed over at the top of this video? Yes and no. Let me start with the one truly “good” aspect: Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.’s “Make America Healthy Again” MAHA movement is having a complete and total meltdown over this. Remember that moron, “The Food Babe?” She told the New York Times that “It’s really sickening” and that this will now be a “midterm issue.”
And “Zen Honeycutt, founder of Moms Across America and an advocate for the MAHA movement, on Thursday called the decision “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.”
That’s great. I love that for them. They can join the former MAGA dipshits who genuinely cared about the Epstein files, and the ones who genuinely cared about not getting the US involved in any new wars, in keeping their asses on the couch this November.
But besides that, is this decision “good” in that it happens to align with the science that says that glyphosate is probably safe for humans? Unfortunately, I can’t even really say that. Because while we don’t have strong evidence that it’s actually dangerous, we do have a lot of evidence of Bayer being shady as shit about their product’s safety.
For instance, back in 2021, a couple of agricultural scientists took advantage of all the lawsuits about Roundup, grabbing a bunch of discovery documents that otherwise would have been kept secret. They found that Monsanto had its own employees write research articles but kept their names off the final paper to avoid scrutiny; the company also pressured a journal editor they had formerly hired as a consultant to retract a paper critical of them. There were also many other examples of experts failing to disclose that they had received funding from Monsanto.
So we can’t really be confident that the science shows glyphosate is safe, because just like with tobacco and vapes and some medications, a very powerful corporation has put its thumb on the scientific scale.
But it isn’t even JUST the scientific malpractice that should concern you: naturally, Bayer is also engaged in underhanded political dealings. Here’s video from a hearing in the Environment Subcommittee of the Committee on Energy and Commerce from April of this year, in which Congressperson AOC confronts Lee Zeldin, the current head of the EPA, on a meeting he says he did not have with Bayer last year.
Did you catch all that? Through a FOIA request, originally done (I think) by the Center for Biological Diversity, we now know that the guy running the EPA lied about a meeting with representatives of Bayer, claiming it was just a “meet and greet” with zero talk of their ongoing litigation. Documents reveal that the agenda was, in fact:
“Supreme Court Action: Bayer will give an update to the Administrator on where they stand in litigation and labeling options”
“Thanks: Bayer will provide a small thanks for updating the glyphosate web page and work on MAHA.”
And that updated glyphosate web page? That refers to an EPA decision that happened just a few weeks before the meeting: they withdrew that 2022 letter giving California permission to require warning labels on glyphosate, an act that was then cited by the solicitor general in a brief filed with the Supreme Court urging them to rule in favor of Bayer.
Yep. Legal, scientific, and moral malpractice. But hey, like I said, at least MAHA is furious. Let’s hope that’s just one final nail in the coffin for Republicans this November.
