According to FiercePharma, a drug and drug-manufacturer news website, Bayer will revise its proposed settlement that deals with future Roundup cancer cases. 

Although Bayer will pay nearly $10 billion to settle approximately 125,000 lawsuits over Roundup, the infamous weed killer the German pharmaceutical giant acquired when it purchased the Monsanto Corporation in 2018 for $63 billion, a judge hinted that he would be reluctant to approve of the $1.25 plan to settle any future Roundup cases. 

Glyphosate, the main chemical ingredient in Roundup, has been linked to non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma, a cancer that starts in the white blood cells. Despite the fact that cities, U.S. states and countries around the world have banned the use of the chemical, to date, only one institution has deemed glyphosate a human carcinogen, the International Agency for Research on Cancer, which functions under the auspices of the World Health Organization. 

According to the Environmental Protection Agency’s website, “EPA continues to find that there are no risks of concern to human health when glyphosate is used in accordance with its current label. EPA also found that glyphosate is unlikely to be a human carcinogen.”

Some Roundup users may not have yet developed symptoms of non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma, thus the $1.25 billion apportionment to settle future cases. 

However, FiercePharma reports that the judge said he was “tentatively inclined” to reject Bayer’s plan for handling future claims. 

As part of the settlement, Bayer would set up an independent panel, consisting of five scientists to determine whether Roundup is carcinogenic, and if the panel only determined a correlation and not causation between exposure to glyphosate and cancer, then no new future Roundup cancer claims could be pursued. 

However, the judge said it should be up to judges’ and juries to determine if Roundup is responsible for injury, not a small group of scientists. Furthermore, the judge expressed concern about lumping all future plaintiffs into one finding because new research and discoveries about the chemical could be made. This latest development shows that the over $10 billion settlement is far from the end of the Roundup saga.