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

Enlarge / St. Louis, Missouri, back before everything was cancelled due to coronavirus. (credit: Tetra Images | Henryk Sadura | Getty Images )

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.

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