Missouri sues China over coronavirus, claims nation “lied to the world”

The pandemic is a challenge for all of us. The economic knock-on effects of the health crisis are themselves another crisis. Many people are wildly casting about, not just for solutions, but for someone to take the blame. It’s hard to punish the SARS-CoV-2 virus, of course; whether or not one regards a virus as a living thing, it is most certainly not a legal person in any sense.

The office of Missouri Attorney General Eric Schmitt has apparently decided that, in the absence of any way to sue a virus, the next best course of action is to take to court the entire nation where the disease originated. To that end, Schmitt’s office said yesterday it had filed a lawsuit against “the Chinese government, Chinese Communist Party, and other Chinese officials and institutions” for the COVID-19 pandemic.

The complaint (PDF) first confirms that, as of Monday, there were more than 5,800 confirmed cases of COVID-19 in Missouri, from which at least 177 persons had died. It then claims that “the virus unleashed by the Communist Party of China and the Chinese government has left no community in the world untouched,” adding that the pandemic “is the direct result of a sinister campaign of malfeasance and deception” carried out by all of China’s leadership.

The suit accuses Chinese entities of denying the risk of human-to-human transmission of the disease, silencing whistleblowers, not acting to contain the outbreak, and hoarding personal protective equipment, instead only exporting “defective” equipment to other nations.

“In Missouri, the impact of the virus is very real—thousands have been infected and many have died, families have been separated from dying loved ones, small businesses are shuttering their doors, and those living paycheck to paycheck are struggling to put food on their table,” Schmitt said in a statement, alleging that Chinese authorities “lied to the world” and “must be held accountable.”

“Accountability,” in this case, would apparently look like a big sack of money. The suit asks for the defendants—i.e., China—to be required to pay civil penalties, punitive damages, compensatory damages, and restitution, including reimbursing the cost of the state’s “abatement efforts.”

That’s not how any of this works

To be sure, almost every state and local government is suddenly facing an immediate spending and budget crisis due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Tax revenues are drying up—you can’t tax paychecks that aren’t being issued to laid-off workers, meals that aren’t being served in closed restaurants, retail sales that aren’t being made in closed stores, or nights not spent in closed hotels—just as spending on unemployment and other health and social needs is skyrocketing.

Suing China, however, is not going to help. Even if every word in the suit had merit—which is a fairly big “if”—US law for the most part prohibits civil suits against foreign states. A handful of other coronavirus-related suits filed against China in other states are likely to fail quickly for the same reasons.

A spokesperson for China’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs said Wednesday that the suit had no factual or legal basis, adding, “These so-called lawsuits are purely malicious abuses.”

The administration has been focused on the Chinese origin of the virus since its emergence became public news in January, repeatedly demanding to have it called the “Wuhan virus” or the “China virus.”

In more recent days, the unsupported claim that China created the novel coronavirus in a laboratory, then tried to cover up its spread, has become a popular talking point among conservative news outlets such as Fox News, and US President Donald Trump on Friday called for an investigation. There is no scientific evidence that this is true, and last week Dr. Anthony Fauci, the top US infectious disease expert, told reporters, “A group of highly qualified evolutionary virologists looked at the sequences in bats as they evolve. The mutations that it took to get to the point where it is now are totally consistent with a jump of a species from an animal to a human.”