Mississippi and Missouri sued China in April last year
More than a year into the COVID-19 pandemic, two Republican states are keeping up their efforts to hold China accountable for the spread of the virus that has killed hundreds of thousands of Americans and sparked an economic downturn from which the U.S. has still not recovered.
Mississippi and Missouri both sued China in federal court in the initial days of the pandemic last year, joining several class-action lawsuits against Beijing — at a time when the Trump administration was blaming China as a key actor in the pandemic.
The virus is believed to have originated in Wuhan, and the secretive communist government was accused of downplaying the virus and misleading the world in the early days of the pandemic — leaving other countries, including the U.S., exposed and without time to prepare.
Legal experts have warned that the cases face long odds because foreign governments are generally granted immunity from domestic suits. But that doesn’t mean the Republican states plan on giving up holding the Chinese behemoth accountable.
