Calling it "junk science," a California federal judge has tossed out in one case a key study that has underpinned many of the thousands of lawsuits filed against Monsanto that claim the key ingredient in its Roundup weedkiller causes cancer.
On June 20, U.S. District Court Vince Chhabria granted Monsanto's motion to exclude the testimony and supposed research findings of Luoping Zhang, a toxicology professor at the University of California Berkeley, from the evidence presented by plaintiffs attorneys on behalf of plaintiff Angelo Bulone.
At the same time, Chhabria granted summary judgment to Monsanto in the case, appearing to end Bulone's lawsuit.
Judge Vince Chhabria of the U.S. District Court for California's Northern District
| ce9.uscourts.gov/
In his ruling, Chhabria blasted the plaintiffs for attempting to use a so-called "meta-analysis" of others' work as a stand-in for scientific research that actually establishes a link between using products containing the herbicide generically known as glyphosate - the active ingredient in Roundup and similar weedkillers - and a particular kind of cancer.
"There are several issues with her (Zhang's) opinion, each of which is an independent ground for exclusion," Chhabria wrote in his decision. "First, Zhang's meta-analysis is junk science. It has deep methodological problems..."
Bulone, of South Carolina, filed suit against Monsanto and other defendants in December 2019 in Georgetown County, South Carolina, Court of Common Pleas.
The lawsuit was filed by attorney Theile B. McVey and others from the firms of Kassel McVey, of Columbia, South Carolina, and Fears Nachawati PLLC, of Dallas, Texas.
According to the lawsuit, Bulone was diagnosed with a cancer known as chronic lymphocytic leukemia in 1995. In the lawsuit, Bulone blamed that cancer on exposure to glyphosate from 1988-1991, when he allegedly used weedkillers containing the herbicide made by Monsanto, while he owned and operated the Wedgefiled Plantation Golf Country Club in South Carolina.
According to the complaint, Bulone would "ride in the back of a golf cart with a handheld sprayer, spraying every inch of the golf course" with Roundup for "three hours a day, 25 days a month, every month of the year from 1988 to 1991."
According to the complaint, Bulone allegedly first learned in 2019 that his cancer could be connected to using Roundup.
Bulone's lawsuit was roughly similar to thousands of other legal claims against Monsanto landing in courts across the country in recent years, accusing the agrichemical giant of allegedly causing cancer in people using their weedkiller and similar products containing glyphosate.
Thousands of those claims have been centered in federal court in San Francisco.
According to an estimate from the website Drugwatch, there are still 4,285 Roundup cancer lawsuits still pending in a so-called multi district litigation grouped by the federal courts in the Northern District of California, under the watch of Judge Chhabria.
Litigation, however, has continued in other jurisdictions, as well, at times resulting in headline-grabbing verdicts worth hundreds of millions of dollars or more.
In San Diego County, for instance, a Superior Court judge slashed a verdict lodged by a jury against Monsanto over alleged Roundup-caused cancer from $332 million to $28 million.
In California, juries have ordered Monsanto to pay almost $2.4 billion in damages over Roundup exposure claims.
In Philadelphia, a jury ordered Monsanto to pay $2.2 billion in one trial, while other verdicts in that city's notoriously plaintiff-friendly courts have ranged from $3.5 million to $175 million each.
All of these trials have come after Monsanto, now under the ownership of Bayer, agreed in 2020 to pay $11 billion to settle most claims related to Roundup exposure.
However, four years after that settlement, and as juries continue to award big paydays to plaintiffs, in the Bulone case, Judge Chhabria has declared a key study relied upon by plaintiffs' lawyers targeting Monsanto in the Roundup action to be "junk," because it does not demonstrate the clear link between Roundup exposure and non-Hodgkin lymphoma that plaintiffs have asserted repeatedly in their thousands of lawsuits.
Zhang's report, published in 2019, purported to be a "meta-analysis" of six other epidemiological studies "of varying sizes, methods, and quality," Chhabria wrote. Zhang's study claimed to focus on people examined within those six other studies who "had been exposed to more glyphosate" and thus "would be more likely to show an increased risk of" non-Hodgkin lymphoma (NHL).
In San Francisco federal court, Bulone's lawyers introduced Zhang's publications and testimony to support their "general causation" claims, linking Roundup to Bulone's cancer.
Monsanto assailed that study, asserting Zhang's actual work product doesn't match her claims within the study. They petitioned Chhabria to exclude Zhang and her work from the plaintiff's case.
Chhabria agreed, saying Zhang's "meta-analysis" was too flawed to allow it to be used as evidence under federal court evidence rules.
The judge noted that only half of the studies Zhang used distinguished among study participants based on their level of Roundup exposure, presenting a "fundamental problem ... that her meta-analysis was not reliably performed."
The meta-analysis, Chhabria said, "ends up mixing different types of studies and different types of data in a way that ultimately seems hard to justify."
"... The study methodologically de-emphasizes high-quality data that would tend to reduce the 'meta-risk ratio,' while using the full datasets from most of the lower-quality studies," Chhabria wrote.
He noted Zhang's analysis also did not properly account for Roundup users' potential exposure to other herbicides and insecticides, which they may have used along with glyphosate.
Zhang's analysis, the judge said, "slices and dices the available epidemiological evidence" to produce allegedly misleading results.
"In short, the meta-analysis restricts itself to a more or less arbitrary subset of the epidemiological data points," Chhabria write. "And it does so in a way that seems likely to exacerbate, rather than ameliorate, problems with confounding. Even on its own terms, it is junk science."
The judge further criticized plaintiffs and Zhang for attempting to substitute a meta-analysis for a "reliable general causation opinion" founded on a scientific case control study. The judge noted Zhang's work "doesn't seem to offer the necessary conclusion about general causation" to uphold a claim like Bulone's against Monsanto.
"... Saying there is a 'compelling link' or an 'association' isn’t the same as saying that Roundup is capable of causing NHL in humans — which is what a plaintiff’s general causation evidence must enable the jury to conclude," Chhabria wrote.
And the judge rejected Bulone's lawyers' assertion that the judge is impermissibly substituting his "judgment about the quality of the meta-analysis for the judgment of the scientific community." They pointed to the fact that Zhang's analysis was "peer-reviewed" by other scientists prior to publication and "has been cited many times" by other scientists.
But Chhabria said, "These points can't make the study's glaring methodological flaws disappear."
"It’s true that the meta-analysis was published in a peer-reviewed journal and prepared before Zhang got personally involved in any Roundup cases (although the paper seems so results-driven that one could be forgiven for doubting that its authors were really thinking 'independently' of the nationwide litigation).
"But while those facts are entitled to consideration, they don’t mean that blind deference to Zhang is appropriate. There are a vast number of peer-reviewed journals out there. Pre-publication editorial peer review, just by itself, is far from a guarantee of scientific reliability," the judge said.
"...In short, simply intoning that a paper was peerreviewed and that it was (apparently) produced before the author was thinking about getting involved in litigation isn’t enough to compensate for methodological problems as glaring as those described here. And it certainly isn’t enough to show that Zhang’s paper can support a reliable general causation opinion," Chhabria said.
Saying his ruling removed any possibility of Bulone presenting "general causation" expert testimony to back his claims, Chhabria granted judgment to Monsanto and ended Bulone's case.
Bulone has been most recently represented by attorneys Gibbs Henderson, Erin Wood and John Raggio, of the Nachawati Law Group, of Dallas.
Monsanto has been represented in the action by attorneys Linda C. Hsu, K. Lee Marshall and Jed P. White, of the firm of Bryan Cave Leighton Paisner, of San Francisco and Santa Monica; Michael X. Imbroscio, of Covington & Burling, of Washington, D.C.; Brian L. Stekloff and Rakesh Kilaru, of the firm of Wilkinson Stekloff, of Washington, D.C.; and Eric G. Lasker, of Hollingsworth LLP, of Washington, D.C.