Bayer stock dives after lawsuit loss
Jury awards $289M in first case to go to trial; hundreds more filed.
Bayer’s stock slumped more than 10 percent in trading Monday, three days after a California jury awarded $289 million to a former groundskeeper who said the popular weedkiller Roundup gave him terminal cancer.
The nearly two-year low sent a cautionary signal to the company that acquired Monsanto, the maker of the weedkiller, in June for $63 billion. Monsanto is already facing hundreds of lawsuits claiming Roundup carries deadly heath hazards.
At the time of a May 2017 CNN investigation, more than 800 patients were suing Monsanto and pointing to Roundup as the cause of their cancer. Since then, hundreds more have come forward with similar claims. The groundskeeper, Dewayne Johnson, was the first to have his case go to trial because doctors said he was close to death.
Monsanto’s vice president, Scott Partridge, said in a statement Friday that the verdict “does not change the fact that more than 800 scientific studies and reviews ... support the fact that glyphosate does not cause cancer, and did not cause Mr. Johnson’s cancer.”
Partridge said Monsanto would appeal the decision “and continue to vigorously defend this product.”
Johnson’s attorneys said that his client used Roundup 20 to 30 times per year while working for a school district outside San Francisco.
Johnson, 46, was diagnosed with non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma in 2014.