Court battle over Covid-19. The Chinese are demanding 53.5 billion from the state of Missouri

The website of the South China Morning Post reports the commencement of the proceedings. The lawsuit was jointly filed on April 30, 2025 by the Wuhan city government, the Chinese Academy of Sciences and its subsidiary, the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV), against the state of Missouri and two former state attorneys general, Eric Schmitt and Andrew Bailey.

The court accepted the case on May 7 of the same year. In December, the indictment list was updated for Catherine Hanaway, the current attorney general of Missouri. Hanaway acknowledged receiving the court documents last December.

According to the court's statement on Monday, the authors of the lawsuit accuse the defendants of intentionally using the American justice system to fight them. According to them, the defendants not only abused court procedures in the USA, but also fabricated false information and spread stigmatizing and discriminatory statements.

These actions seriously violated the plaintiffs' right to protect their good name and caused huge losses, it added.

Court documents show that Chinese institutions are seeking damages in the amount of 356.437 billion yuan (about $53.5 billion). They also want the defendants to publicly apologize in the US and Chinese media, including The New York Times, CNN, YouTube and Xinhua.

Counterclaims

The Chinese trial is part of mutual Covid-19-related legal proceedings between the two countries. It started in 2020 when Eric Schmitt, then Missouri's attorney general, filed a lawsuit against the Chinese government. It alleged that Chinese officials denied there was a risk of human-to-human transmission of the virus, silenced whistleblowers and failed to contain the outbreak, allowing the infection to spread around the world.

Schmitt claimed he was seeking "compensation for the enormous loss of life, suffering and economic upheaval that all of Missouri has faced because of the Covid-19 pandemic that has brought the entire world to a standstill."

The defendants were: the National Health Commission of China, the municipal authorities of Wuhan - where the epidemic was first detected - and the Institute of Virology in Wuhan, which is suspected of a laboratory leak as the source of the pandemic.

The lab said early in the pandemic that it had been "seriously harmed" by conspiracy theories circulating online, including that the new strain of the virus was "man-made" and "leaked from the WIV lab."

It added that other allegations included: "WIV was taken over by the military," "WIV employee died from the virus," "WIV student is patient zero," and "WIV employee informed authorities that WIV chief was responsible" for the pandemic.