The Supreme Court has granted legal immunity to Bayer, maker of the weedkiller Roundup, from lawsuits alleging that the chemical glyphosate causes cancer. 

The 7-2 decision announced on Thursday will send a shockwave through the Make America Healthy Again movement, which blames the chemical not only for rising cancer rates among agriculture workers but also for gluten intolerance and metabolic dysfunction. But it is a win for large agriculture corporations that argue the pesticide is essential to maintain food security. 

The majority opinion, written by Justice Brett Kavanaugh, found that the Environmental Protection Agency has sole authority to decide warnings for pesticide labels, rather than state-based civil juries. According to the ruling, a manufacturer is legally required to use EPA-approved labels unless and until the agency subsequently approves or requires a new label.

Justices John Roberts, Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito, Sonja Sotomayor, Elena Kagan, and Amy Coney Barrett joined Kavanaugh’s opinion. Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson wrote the dissenting opinion, joined by Justice Neil Gorsuch. 

Pesticide reform has long been a goal of the grassroots health and wellness cause, which eventually morphed into the MAHA movement when future Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. joined forces with President Donald Trump on the 2024 presidential campaign trail.

Glyphosate is the most common weedkiller and agricultural pesticide in the United States. Roughly 280 million pounds of glyphosate is sprayed on nearly 300 million acres of farmland each year, according to the EPA.

MAHA advocates say glyphosate is responsible for both rising cancer rates among agriculture workers and the increase in gluten intolerance and other metabolic dysfunction issues, making the Supreme Court’s decision to grant liability to Bayer a loss for the movement. 

The case, Monsanto v. Durnell, revolves around whether the Federal Insecticide, Fungicide, and Rodenticide Act gives the EPA sole authority to determine what warning labels can be on regulated products, including warnings that a product may contain cancer-causing chemicals.

Bayer, the parent company of Monsanto and maker of glyphosate, has faced billions of dollars in civil litigation claims, saying that it failed to warn consumers that Roundup, the commercial name for glyphosate, may be linked to the cancer non-Hodgkin lymphoma. 

So-called “failure to warn” cases against Bayer started after a working group of the World Health Organization’s International Agency for Research on Cancer classified the chemical as “probably carcinogenic to humans” in 2015.

The plaintiff, John Durnell, alleges his cancer was triggered by agricultural glyphosate exposure. A Missouri jury in 2019 awarded Durnell $1.25 million in damages, citing the failure of Monsanto to warn consumers of the cancer risk. A Missouri appellate court sided with Durnell, and the state Supreme Court declined to take up Monsanto’s second appeal. 

The federal Supreme Court agreed to hear the case after the Department of Justice intervened on behalf of Bayer, Monsanto’s parent company, arguing that warning labels should be based on EPA evidence rather than decided on a state-by-state basis or by civil juries.

The EPA, which has regulated glyphosate since the 1970s, is scheduled to review the environmental and human health effects of the chemical later this year. Unlike the IARC, the EPA does not view the evidence as pointing to glyphosate being carcinogenic to humans. 

Kavanaugh’s decision found that the EPA’s authority over labeling requirements cannot be challenged by state court juries relying on outside evidence like that from IARC. 

The question before the court was whether or not the state jury’s claim that Bayer failed to warn its consumers “would impose a labeling requirement that is ‘in addition to or different from’ federal labeling requirements,” Kavanaugh wrote, citing the FIFRA statute.

“The answer is yes,” Kavanaugh wrote. 

Boon for Bayer

After the decision was released, Bayer’s stock price soared, up 18% as of Thursday at noon. 

The Modern Ag Alliance, an industry group for larger farmers and ranchers, celebrated the decision, saying the ruling in the EPA’s favor brings stability to the industry by relying on science-based regulations rather than jury determinations.

“Farmers are already carrying enough uncertainty, from tight margins to rising costs, and they should not have to question whether the tools they rely on will remain available,” said Elizabeth Burns-Thompson, Modern Ag Alliance executive director.

Although the ruling prevents Bayer from being subject to continued civil litigation payouts, Kavanaugh noted in the majority opinion that the EPA is still able to change the product label if presented with new evidence.

“EPA possesses a variety of tools to learn of and address new safety information,” Kavanaugh wrote, adding that third parties “are free to petition EPA to modify, suspend, or cancel a pesticide’s registration.” 

MAHA-aligned organizations have put pressure on both the EPA and Congress to tighten restrictions on glyphosate, regardless of the pending review being conducted by the agency.

EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin told a group of MAHA supporters earlier this year that, at his agency, “there is no pre-judging of what the review is going to show.” 

“Whatever the science and the review shows, that is what gets communicated to the public,” Zeldin said at the event, adding that he does not want to “have a process where I’m telling scientists before it starts what I want the final product to show.”

Political fallout for MAHA

Because of the Trump administration’s support for Bayer, the decision will likely drive a wedge between the GOP and MAHA swing voters.

Prominent activists within the MAHA movement took to X shortly after the decision to voice discontent with the decision and the administration.

Health and wellness activist Vani Hari, aka the “Food Babe,” said on X that she was “literally sick” about the decision. 

“The message from this ruling is dangerous: if a federal agency approves a product, manufacturers may be shielded from accountability even when people are harmed,” Hari said.

Shaughnessy Naughton, president of the Democrat-led political strategy group 314 Action, said the decision “puts politics above patients.”

“The U.S. Supreme Court just handed Big Chemical Corporations a ‘Get Out of Jail Free’ card,” Naughton said. “With this decision, thousands of cancer injury lawsuits across the country will be wiped away.”

314 Action lobbies to elect scientists and medical professionals into public office and actively works against certain MAHA-backed policies, such as vaccine reform, but supports more bipartisan causes, such as food and pesticide reform.

“This decision is a major setback to an already splintered MAHA coalition,” Naughton said. “If corporations won’t pay for the damage they’ve caused, it’s almost certain that RFK Jr. will pay a steep political price for this.”

A March poll conducted by 314 Action found that 76% of voters support reducing pesticides in agriculture, including 47% who strongly support such proposals. 

Another poll conducted in May by the health policy group KFF found that 2 in 3 voters, regardless of political affiliation or identification with MAHA, believe there is not enough regulation of pesticides in agriculture.

Only 36% of respondents to the KFF poll said they were at least somewhat confident that the EPA could act independently on glyphosate without outside industry influence.