It Is Not Rational to Allow Bayer to Externalize Their Costs on Society. YOU Can Stop This Madness.

If you eat food, this article is for you. It is irrational to reward fraud. We all will pay for Bayer's externalized costs - as well as any other chemical company that claims "Me, Too!"

Apr 04, 2026

Good Morning, Popular Rationalists. Grab a coffee. It’s time to fully engage with this issue.

Monsanto funded ghostwritten science that shaped EPA’s “safe” classification. That classification is now, by legislative fiat in three states, a complete shield against accountability for any harm the product has caused.

This week, within seven days, contact your legislators at the state and tell them “NO LIABILITY FOR CHEMICAL MANUFACTURERS”. Send them this article. This is how we defeated workplace mandates for COVID-19 jabs. And the next step is equally important.

The only way for the American consumer and taxpayer to end this legislative toxicant nightmare is to stop buying food made using or shipped using Glyphosate. We need to ask our grocers for products that are herbicide and pesticide-free, and tell them that we will drive the extra ten miles if need be to find a source of truly clean vegetables, clean, hormone-free grass-fed meats, clean pasta and bread products.

There is a word in economics for what happens when a corporation produces harm, collects the profits, and arranges for everyone else to pay the damage bill. That word is “externalization”. It is one of the most studied and best-documented failure modes of unregulated markets, and it is precisely what Bayer — the German agrochemical giant that purchased Monsanto in 2018 — has just engineered at the state level, with a critical assist from the U.S. Supreme Court on deck.

On April 2, 2026, Kentucky’s Republican-led General Assembly overrode Democratic Governor Andy Beshear’s veto to enact SB 199, making Kentucky the third state to pass a pesticide liability shield law. North Dakota did it first (HB 1318, effective July 1, 2025). Georgia did it second (SB 144, effective January 1, 2026). And now Kentucky has joined the club. At least six more states introduced identical or nearly identical legislation in 2026 — Florida, Kansas, Missouri, Tennessee, Wyoming, and others — following a coordination playbook executed through a corporate lobbying vehicle called the Modern Ag Alliance, which Bayer founded after similar legislation failed in multiple states in 2024.

These laws all do the same thing: they declare that a pesticide manufacturer’s duty to warn consumers about health risks is fully satisfied by whatever label the EPA has approved. In practice, that means if you develop non-Hodgkin lymphoma after years of applying Roundup and Bayer knew the risk but didn’t warn you, you now have no cause of action in North Dakota, Georgia, or Kentucky. The EPA’s approval — obtained, as we will show, on the basis of manufacturer-controlled science — becomes your death warrant with no legal recourse.

I am going to show you, with specific numbers grounded in peer-reviewed literature and actuarial data, exactly who now pays the costs that Bayer is no longer required to pay. The answer is: you do. Your taxes, your insurance premiums, your out-of-pocket bills, your family’s uncompensated caregiver labor. Bayer pockets the profits. Society absorbs the harm. This is textbook externalization, and it is irrational to permit it.

The Science: What We Actually Know, and What Was Hidden

Before we can project costs, we have to establish what the underlying science says — and document the now-proven corruption of the foundational safety evidence.

Glyphosate is the active ingredient in Roundup, introduced by Monsanto in 1974. It is the most widely used herbicide in human history. The U.S. Geological Survey estimated approximately 275 million pounds applied in the United States in 2018 alone. Since the commercialization of glyphosate-resistant GMO crops in the late 1990s, use surged roughly 100-fold over the product’s lifetime. The compound is now detectable in air, water, soil, house dust, food, and the urine of the majority of the American population. The CDC’s National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey found detectable glyphosate in approximately 80% of urine samples tested. Children 6–11 years old showed the lowest rate of concentration decline despite declining national averages, likely because of dietary exposure, outdoor play, and proximity to treated fields.

The cancer question has a complicated regulatory history, but a clear scientific one. In 2015, the International Agency for Research on Cancer — the WHO’s gold-standard cancer classification body — classified glyphosate as “probably carcinogenic to humans” (Group 2A), based on sufficient evidence of carcinogenicity in experimental animals and limited evidence in humans, primarily the consistent association with non-Hodgkin lymphoma (NHL). A subsequent meta-analysis of the highest-exposure studies found a 41% increased risk of NHL among those exposed to glyphosate-based herbicides (relative risk ≈ 1.41). IARC also found “strong evidence” that glyphosate and glyphosate-based formulations are genotoxic, with consistent DNA damage and oxidative stress signals operating in humans.

An Institute for Pure and Applied Knowledge (IPAK) Preliminary Report (February 21, 2026) analyzed 1,071 published studies on glyphosate or glyphosate-based formulations. Of these, 712 (66%) reported evidence of harm or adverse effects, while 359 (34%) reported no significant harm detected — a nearly 2:1 imbalance favoring harm findings. The divergence sharpened dramatically after IARC’s 2015 classification: in most post-2015 years, harm-reporting studies outnumbered null findings by roughly two-to-one or more, peaking in 2023 at 86 harm vs. 34 no-harm studies. Most harm findings (88.5%) concern non-cancer functional effects: endocrine and metabolic disruption (17%), neurotoxicity and behavioral effects (15%), developmental and teratogenic outcomes (15%), liver toxicity (12%), reproductive impairment (9%), and additional signals in gut microbiome disruption, immune function, kidney, and cardiovascular systems. Formulations were often more toxic than technical glyphosate alone due to surfactants. Chronic studies showing harm outnumbered chronic null studies where duration was reported.

And cancer is only a fraction of what the studies are showing: Reproductive impairment, endocrine/metabolic disruption, neurotoxicity/behavioral effects, developmental/teratogenic effects, liver toxicity and other functional effects make up the vast majority of the health effects seen in studies.

This matters for the externalization argument in a way that is not yet reflected in current cost projections. The 200,000 NHL claims represent one visible peak of a much larger iceberg. The non-cancer harm literature — endocrine disruption, neurodevelopmental effects, reproductive impairment — represents potential future disease burden that has not yet translated into mass litigation but will translate into healthcare costs. The cost projections I present below address NHL only. They are conservative floors.

The EPA, by contrast, has maintained that glyphosate is “not likely to be carcinogenic to humans.” That determination has now been substantially undermined. In late 2025, the journal “Regulatory Toxicology and Pharmacology” retracted a landmark 2000 paper that had for decades formed the scientific backbone of EPA’s safety determination. The retraction was issued for undisclosed conflicts of interest: the authors had failed to disclose financial ties to Monsanto, relied heavily on Monsanto’s own unpublished proprietary research rather than independently verifiable data, and included Monsanto employees as uncredited authors — a practice known as ghostwriting. This is not academic misconduct at the margins. This is regulatory capture by scientific fraud. The paper shaped EPA policy. EPA policy now forms the legal defense. The legal defense is now enshrined in state law.

Let that chain sink in. Monsanto funded ghostwritten science that shaped EPA’s “safe” classification. That classification is now, by legislative fiat in three states, a complete shield against accountability for any harm the product has caused.

This is not a “both sides” scientific dispute. This is a falsification event. Under Popperian standards, the foundational evidence for the “safe” determination has been retracted under documented fraudulent circumstances. The null hypothesis of safety has not been upheld; it has been procedurally maintained by suppressed counter-evidence. The IPAK literature analysis confirms what the suppressed evidence always indicated: across 1,071 independent studies, harm signals outnumber null findings by a ratio of nearly two to one. The correct scientific response is to acknowledge that the safety determination was made on corrupted data and should be revisited from scratch using only independently generated studies. The correct policy response is to suspend the liability shield until that review is complete. Neither is happening.

The Litigation Context: Bayer’s Multi-Front Containment Strategy

By 2026, approximately 200,000 Roundup-related claims have been filed against Bayer. Juries have returned significant verdicts repeatedly and consistently: $289 million for school groundskeeper Dewayne Johnson (reduced to $78 million on appeal); $80 million for Edwin Hardeman; $2 billion for Alva and Alberta Pilliod; a $2.1 billion verdict in Georgia just two months before Governor Kemp signed SB 144. In late 2025, Missouri courts upheld a $611 million judgment (reduced from $1.56 billion) for four plaintiffs. The verdicts have not been flukes. They have been a signal.

Bayer has now committed to a proposed $7.25 billion class settlement, filed in a St. Louis circuit court, that would cover NHL claims from individuals exposed prior to February 17, 2026. The settlement received preliminary court approval on March 4, 2026. Class members have until June 4, 2026 to opt out if they wish to pursue independent litigation, and a final fairness hearing is scheduled for July 9, 2026. The settlement is structured to pay out over 21 years at up to approximately $165,000 per eligible claim — a number that dramatically understates what individual jury verdicts have produced, and which is structured to minimize net present value to claimants. Bayer can withdraw if too many claimants opt out.

Simultaneously, Bayer has asked the U.S. Supreme Court to rule in “Durnell v. Monsanto” — oral arguments are scheduled for April 27, 2026 — that federal pesticide law under FIFRA preempts all state failure-to-warn claims. The Trump administration filed a brief siding with Bayer, reversing the Biden-era position. If the Court rules for Bayer, every state in the country effectively becomes North Dakota, Georgia, and Kentucky simultaneously. The state-level shield laws would become redundant because the federal shield would already be total. The company’s strategy is not to win one lawsuit. It is to eliminate the category of lawsuit.

This is a deliberate, coordinated, multi-front legal strategy: state legislature lobbying, a Supreme Court preemption bid, a settlement structured to neutralize current claims, and a presidential executive order — issued February 18, 2026 — invoking the Defense Production Act to designate glyphosate and phosphorus as national security materials and direct USDA to protect domestic producers from “undue regulation.” The government of the United States is now treating a probable human carcinogen as strategic war material. The MAHA coalition, which campaigned on removing toxins from the food supply, finds itself on the opposite side of this argument from the administration it helped elect. That is a fracture line worth watching carefully.

The Externalization Math: Who Pays Now

Cost externalization projections require explicit assumptions. I will state them clearly so they can be challenged.

The three enacting states: North Dakota (population ~775,000), Georgia (~11 million), Kentucky (~4.5 million). Combined population ~16.3 million, or approximately 4.9% of the U.S. national total. These are agricultural states with above-average glyphosate application intensity, so their share of exposure-attributable claims likely runs 6–8% of the national total, not 4.9%.

NHL incidence: Using the NCI SEER baseline rate of approximately 19.8 per 100,000 per year: North Dakota produces roughly 153 new NHL cases per year, Georgia roughly 2,178, Kentucky roughly 891. Total across three states: approximately 3,222 new NHL cases per year.

Glyphosate-attributable fraction: The Population Attributable Risk (PAR) calculation uses the IARC meta-analysis relative risk of 1.41. For agricultural workers with high exposure prevalence (~85%), PAR% = (0.85 × 0.41) / (1 + 0.85 × 0.41) ≈ 25.8%. For a mixed farm/non-farm state population, I use 20% as the central estimate, with 12% as the conservative floor and 30% as the high bound. These produce annual attributable case estimates of 386 (conservative), 645 (central), and 967 (high) across the three states.

Treatment costs per case: Drawing on Medicare claims data in the peer-reviewed literature — initial-year costs of approximately $71,000 for NHL in Medicare patients, ongoing annual costs of $22,000–$30,000, and end-of-life year costs of $100,000–$130,000 — a 5-year full-disease-course estimate of $200,000 per patient is well-supported as a central figure. I use $150,000 (conservative) and $275,000 (high) as bounds. These are direct medical costs only; they exclude non-economic damages, caregiver labor, and lost productivity.

Payer distribution: The median age of NHL diagnosis is approximately 69–71. Medicare is the dominant payer in this population, consistent with published data showing Medicare as the most common insurer in NHL patient cohorts. Applying published payer distributions: Medicare absorbs approximately 62% of costs; Medicaid approximately 11%; commercial insurance approximately 23%; patients out-of-pocket approximately 4%.

Running these numbers at the central estimate across the three states:

Against this, Bayer’s annual savings from foreclosed settlements across the three states (central estimate: approximately 467 new claims per year at $185,000 average settlement value) total approximately $86 million per year — plus roughly $25–30 million per year in avoided litigation costs, bringing Bayer’s annual benefit from the three shields to approximately $110–115 million per year.

This is the externalization, precisely defined: $159 million in annual social costs transferred to taxpayers, insurers, patients, and families — against $110–115 million in annual savings retained as profit by a Germany-based corporation. The state legislatures of North Dakota, Georgia, and Kentucky have enacted a permanent annual wealth transfer from their own citizens to Bayer AG’s balance sheet.

At the 20-year horizon, the central estimate for the three-state social cost burden is approximately $3.2 billion. The high scenario reaches $5.5 billion. These figures address NHL only and do not yet incorporate the broader non-cancer harms documented in the majority of the independent literature. They are conservative floors.

The 30-Year Latency Problem: Why These Numbers Are Floors

The most important number in this analysis is not any of the figures above. It is this one: 30 years.

The latency period between glyphosate exposure and NHL diagnosis can exceed 30 years. This means that every farm worker, landscaper, home gardener, and rural resident who was exposed during the peak Roundup application years of 2010–2020 — and who will develop NHL in the 2030s, 2040s, and 2050s — is already locked out of legal recourse by these shield laws before their cancer has even presented. And many of the people doing this to them will be long gone.

The 20-year projections above capture only the cost of cases from people whose exposure and disease course fall within that window. The full 50-year cost externalization, accounting for the biological latency pipeline already loaded into the population, is conservatively in the range of $8–15 billion for these three states alone — if the current shield laws remain in place and if no additional states enact them. If SCOTUS grants federal preemption in “Durnell”, scale these numbers by approximately 20× to arrive at the national burden.

The latency problem is also why Bayer’s strategic timing is so calculated. The company is moving aggressively now — through state legislatures, through the Supreme Court, through the settlement structure — precisely while there are still potentially hundreds of thousands of future claimants who do not yet know they are claimants. A $7.25 billion settlement that covers only existing diagnoses as of February 17, 2026, while simultaneously foreclosing future litigation through preemption shields, is not a good-faith resolution. It is a liability firewall specifically designed to exclude the largest future cohort of harmed individuals: those who will be diagnosed between 2026 and 2056.

The Fallacy at the Heart of These Laws

The legal mechanism of these shield laws rests on a specific logical claim: that EPA label approval constitutes sufficient evidence of safety, and therefore that failure-to-warn claims are preempted by a manufacturer’s compliance with federal labeling requirements. This argument contains a classical, demonstrable fallacy.

EPA label approval is not an independent safety determination. Under FIFRA, the EPA approves pesticide labels based substantially on manufacturer-submitted data. The foundational safety study for glyphosate — the 2000 “Regulatory Toxicology and Pharmacology” paper — has been retracted for undisclosed manufacturer involvement and reliance on proprietary, non-reproducible Monsanto data. The regulatory standard was set by the regulated party, using data the regulated party generated, reviewed by an agency that was not able to independently verify it.

Laundering manufacturer-controlled science through a regulatory label approval — and then using that approval as a complete legal defense — is not a safety system. It is a closed loop of self-exculpation. The argument is structurally equivalent to saying that because a company passed its own internal audit, no external accountability is permissible. No rationalist should accept this framing. It is regulatory capture. It is American-style fascism.

The further fallacy, implicit in the agricultural lobbying argument (”this protects farmers”), is that shielding pesticide manufacturers from failure-to-warn liability actually benefits farmers. It does not. Farmers are occupationally exposed at the highest levels. Their exposure prevalence, as noted, runs approximately 85%. Their PAR for NHL approaches 26%. When a Kentucky corn farmer develops non-Hodgkin lymphoma after decades of Roundup application and cannot sue, the “protection” the law affords him is the protection of being unable to hold accountable the company that sold him a product it knew or should have known posed a cancer risk. This is not protection. This is abandonment dressed in agrarian language.

And pesticides are not the only route to profitable national agriculture.

The MAHA Contradiction and a Genuine Reform Path

The Make America Healthy Again movement, to its credit, recognized early that America’s disease burden is substantially driven by environmental chemical exposures. The stated agenda of removing toxins from the food supply and environment is correct in its diagnosis. But the execution has produced a contradiction so sharp it deserves direct statement.

The Trump administration’s February 2026 executive order invoking the Defense Production Act to protect domestic glyphosate production — directing USDA to prevent “undue regulation” from threatening corporate viability of glyphosate manufacturers — is structurally incompatible with the MAHA mandate. You cannot simultaneously declare that glyphosate is strategic war material immune from regulatory pressure and that you are committed to getting carcinogenic chemicals out of the food supply. These positions are not in tension. They are direct contradictions.

The resolution is not politically complicated if it is analytically honest. The correct policy framework is:

First, require safety determinations for pesticide approvals to be based on independently replicated studies, not manufacturer submissions. This is not a radical position. It is the basic scientific standard of reproducibility applied to regulatory science. The FIFRA registration process should require that any carcinogenicity determination be supported by at least two independently conducted studies using publicly available protocols. The 2000 Monsanto ghostwriting scandal is a case study in why this standard does not currently exist — and why it must.

Second, repeal or suspend the state-level liability shields pending comprehensive independent review of the glyphosate carcinogenicity literature. Given that the foundational safety study has been retracted under documented fraud, and given that an independent analysis of 1,071 published studies shows harm findings outnumbering null findings by nearly 2:1, continuing to use the corrupted safety record as the regulatory and legal basis for immunity is indefensible.

Third, unless we have actual bona fide liability cases, Bayer will never improve its product line. Do not establish a federal toxic tort compensation fund for glyphosate-related disease, modeled on the National Vaccine Injury Compensation Program, funded by a per-unit levy on glyphosate product sales. This would end up being paid for by taxes on the product, paid for by farmers, passed off as higher costs to consumers or taxpayers anyway, indirectly externalizing costs. Under that model, Bayer sells product that harm; Bayer never funds compensation. Taxpayers, Medicare, Medicaid, and families are removed from the cost-absorption chain. This is structurally sound, politically viable given the bipartisan interest in MAHA, and directly responsive to the market failure these shield laws have institutionalized.

And every single herbicide or pesticide in the future that Big Chem comes up with will be liability-free, regardless of the health effects to applicators, users and consumers.

State-by-State: The Specific Burden Distribution

North Dakota is the smallest population but highest agricultural intensity of the three. Approximately 31 attributable NHL cases annually at central estimate, generating approximately $6.2 million per year in treatment costs absorbed by payers, and approximately $5.9 million per year in foreclosed settlement compensation. The 10-year total externalized cost in North Dakota alone is approximately $124 million. For a state of 775,000 people, this represents a substantial per-capita burden — particularly given that North Dakota’s Medicaid rolls and rural hospital systems will absorb the uninsured and underinsured share.

Georgia is the largest economic exposure of the three, and carries the most damning political irony. In March 2025 — just two months before Governor Kemp quietly signed SB 144 — a Georgia jury awarded $2.1 billion to a Roundup cancer plaintiff. At the $165,000 average settlement the proposed class settlement contemplates, that single verdict would have compensated approximately 12,700 individual claimants. That verdict was explicitly part of the legislative debate. Proponents of SB 144 knew what they were eliminating access to. Annual externalized costs at central estimate: approximately $147 million. 10-year cumulative: approximately $1.47 billion. Georgia also carries an above-average uninsured rate (~12%), meaning a larger share of out-of-pocket burden falls directly on cancer patients and their families rather than on insured pools.

Kentucky is the most recent enactment, and the most politically charged given the Governor’s explicit veto and the legislature’s override. The veto message was substantively correct: the law allows dangerous products to be sold without proper safety warnings, to the benefit of manufacturers and the detriment of consumers. Annual externalized costs at central estimate: approximately $61 million. 10-year cumulative: approximately $610 million. Kentucky is a Medicaid expansion state, which means that the same legislature that voted to eliminate a corporation’s liability simultaneously expanded the public program that will absorb most of the resulting uncompensated medical costs. They privatized the profit and socialized the harm with the same policy agenda.

The Bayer Balance Sheet

Bayer’s stock performance since acquiring Monsanto has been dismal. The company has written down the value of the Monsanto acquisition repeatedly, set aside over $10 billion in Roundup-related litigation reserves, and is currently negotiating a $7.25 billion settlement it hopes will cap future exposure. The company has argued, publicly and before courts, that mounting litigation costs are threatening its ability to continue selling glyphosate products in U.S. markets.

This argument deserves a direct analytical response: that is how tort liability is supposed to work.

When the cost of a product’s harms, properly internalized, exceeds the product’s market value, the rational economic outcome is that the product is priced to reflect its true cost — or it exits the market. That is not a failure of the market. That is the market functioning correctly. Bayer’s legal exposure for Roundup is not a crisis requiring legislative rescue. It is a price signal. The signal says: the harm this product has caused is worth more than the profit it generated.

The correct response to that signal is to allow the litigation to proceed; to allow juries to continue assigning damages on the evidence; and to allow the price discovery process to determine whether Roundup, at its true cost, is commercially viable. Instead, through coordinated lobbying of state legislatures and the federal courts, Bayer has arranged for that price signal to be legally silenced. The costs do not disappear. They are simply transferred — onto Medicare, onto Medicaid, onto insurance premiums, onto taxpayers, onto the families of farmworkers who will develop cancer in the 2030s and have no legal path to compensation.

It is worth noting that Bayer is already developing a successor product. CropKey, with the active ingredient icafolin-methyl, has been filed for regulatory approval in the United States, the EU, Brazil, and Canada. Bayer is explicitly positioning it as a next-generation product designed to sidestep the Roundup litigation. This is the corporate rational response to sustained legal accountability. The company, under litigation pressure, is innovating toward a safer product. That is precisely the mechanism that tort liability is designed to activate. Eliminating that pressure, through legislative immunity, removes the innovation incentive along with the accountability.

Conclusion: Irrationality Has a Price Tag, and You’re Paying It

Rationalism requires that we follow evidence to its logical conclusions regardless of who finds those conclusions inconvenient.

The evidence says: the foundational safety study for glyphosate was produced under fraudulent conditions, relied on manufacturer data, and was retracted in late 2025. The evidence says: the best available independent meta-analysis finds a 41% increased risk of non-Hodgkin lymphoma in highly exposed populations — and IPAK’s analysis of 1,071 published studies shows harm findings outnumbering null findings by nearly 2:1, with a clear post-2015 surge in detection of endocrine, neurodevelopmental, reproductive, liver, and other effects. The evidence says: approximately 200,000 Americans have filed claims against Bayer alleging NHL caused by Roundup exposure, and juries presented with the evidence have found for plaintiffs consistently and repeatedly. The evidence says: three states have now enacted laws that ensure no future plaintiff in those states can present that evidence to a jury.

It is irrational to reward fraud.

The logical conclusion is that North Dakota, Georgia, and Kentucky have enacted a subsidy to a corporation convicted by repeated jury verdicts of knowingly underselling the cancer risk of its products — and that subsidy is paid by their own citizens’ tax dollars, their Medicare premiums, their out-of-pocket medical costs, and the uncompensated labor of their family members providing cancer care.

At the central projection, the three-state annual externalized cost is approximately $159 million per year. The 20-year cumulative burden is approximately $3.2 billion. The full 50-year burden, accounting for the latency pipeline already loaded into the population from peak Roundup years, is estimated at $8–15 billion for these three states alone. If SCOTUS grants federal preemption in “Durnell v. Monsanto” — oral arguments April 27 — multiply by approximately 20 for the national exposure.

Every dollar of that burden that Bayer does not pay is a dollar you pay. Your tax dollars. Your Medicare. Your insurance premiums. Your time caring for a sick family member who had no warning that what they were spraying on their fields was probably giving them cancer.

The Georgia legislature knew about the $2.1 billion verdict. The Kentucky legislature heard the Governor’s veto. They passed the laws anyway.

Irrationality, when it is organized and funded, is called policy. The rational response is to name it for what it is, quantify its costs precisely, assign those costs to the specific entities that bear them, and demand that legislators who vote for externalization explain to their constituents exactly how much they are paying for Bayer’s profits.

What You Can Do NOW: Call Your Representatives and EAT CLEAN.

That accounting begins here. Share this widely.

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