By Tom Hals
(Reuters) -A U.S. judge rejected Bayer’s $2 billion class action proposal to resolve future lawsuits alleging its Roundup weedkiller causes cancer, saying in a Wednesday order that parts of the plan were “clearly unreasonable.”
Bayer has committed up to $9.6 billion to resolve some 125,000 existing claims linking Roundup to non-Hodgkin lymphoma, a type of blood cancer. The proposed class action settlement was aimed at claims by people who have been exposed to the weedkiller and who become sick in the future.
Bayer has said that decades of studies have shown that Roundup and its main active ingredient glyphosate are safe for human use. Bayer did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
U.S. District Court Judge Vince Chhabria in San Francisco said the proposal “would accomplish a lot for Monsanto,” which Bayer acquired for $63 billion in 2018, and “would accomplish far less for the Roundup users” who are currently healthy.
Chhabria had outlined his doubts about the plan in a hearing last week.
The plan would have grouped potentially millions of residential users and farm laborers in a class and provided them free medical exams for four years and up to $200,000 if they were diagnosed with non-Hodgkin lymphoma.
(Reporting by Tom Hals in Wilmington, Delaware; Editing by Noeleen Walder and Bill Berkrot)
