From the Kansas City Star, December 20:
Why China’s $50 billion lawsuit against Missouri is going nowhere | Opinion
Sen. Eric Schmitt looks like he has the Chinese running scared with his pioneering lawsuit against important institutions in the nation over the COVID-19 pandemic. They lashed out this week targeting him and the state of Missouri along with two other current and former Missouri attorneys general for defamation against China, Wuhan province and the Wuhan Institute of Virology. The suit, filed in a Wuhan intermediate court, demands the state pay $50.5 billion in damages.
The new legal salvo could be interesting if Missouri and its current and former lawyers decide to defend the case in Chinese court. There is a growing body of evidence that COVID-19 was the result of a lab leak in Wuhan that the Chinese government should pay for. It would be interesting to see that information submitted to a Chinese court. Even if the communists’ game is fixed, their reaction would be priceless.
If that evidence were persuasive and the rest of the world decided to jump in with their own suits, damages could be unimaginable, certainly in the trillions. But there’s one small hiccup that makes justice for Missouri, and the rest of the world, highly unlikely. That’s sovereign immunity.
Sovereign immunity is the idea that as countries such as China and the United States are theoretically “equal” in international stature. China is not subject to U.S. courts and the U.S. (and Missouri) are not subject to Chinese courts. You can imagine what a mess the world would be if citizens of different countries were always suing other countries in their own domestic courts. That’s why it is written into the 11th Amendment to the Constitution.
Sovereign immunity is also the reason that the $24 billion verdict that Missouri won against China isn’t about COVID-19 itself or who released it from a lab and why, as Schmitt touted when he filed the suit as then-Missouri attorney general. The damages are due to the fact that China and the businesses it controlled bought and sold personal protective equipment in both the United States and elsewhere in ways that looked like hoarding in the early days of the pandemic....
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