Wuhan’s virus lab files $50 billion lawsuit to silence GOP senator

The Chinese lab blamed for sparking the coronavirus pandemic has lashed out with a lawsuit against Sen. Eric S. Schmitt, saying he has ruined Wuhan’s reputation and needs to pay for it — to the tune of roughly $50 billion.

Mr. Schmitt, Missouri Republican, revealed the lawsuit this week, accusing the Wuhan Institute of Virology, the municipal government and the Chinese Academy of Sciences of trying to gag him after he initiated a lawsuit in the U.S. that found China responsible for the deadly virus that crippled the global economy in 2020.

That Missouri lawsuit won a $24 billion judgment in federal court in the U.S. earlier this year, and spurred Wuhan’s retaliatory legal strike.

The Chinese entities say Mr. Schmitt “belittled” the scientists, hurt their “brand value and academic reputation” and made it more difficult to get international cooperation on projects. They assigned a financial value of 356.437 billion yuan to the loss, or about $50 billion.

They also asked the Chinese court to order Mr. Schmitt and his fellow defendants, the state of Missouri and former state attorney general Andrew Bailey — to issue public apologies in The New York Times, CNN, YouTube and Chinese outlets People’s Daily and Xinhuanet.

“The three defendants shall bear the liability of ceasing the infringement, eliminating adverse effects, rehabilitating reputation, extending apologies and compensating losses,” the lawsuit says, according to the diplomatic packet serving notice.

Mr. Schmitt said he considered the lawsuit “a badge of honor” and, far from gagging himself, doubled down on tying Wuhan to the origins of the pandemic.

“China’s deceit during COVID led to immense human suffering and loss, and as Missouri AG, I sued them for it. Now they’ve launched a factually baseless, targeted lawfare campaign against me in an attempt to harass and intimidate me, but it won’t work,” he said in a statement to The Washington Times. “I won’t be bullied, and I won’t back down. Communist China has not heard the last from me.”

More than 7 million global deaths have been blamed on COVID-19, including more than 1.2 million in the U.S.

American officials initially said the virus likely sprang from the wild, but some U.S. agencies now believe it came from the Wuhan lab.

That was also the crux of the lawsuit Mr. Schmitt filed as attorney general in Missouri, and Mr. Bailey saw to conclusion with the $24 billion judgment earlier this year. The Chinese entities didn’t mount a defense.

Catherine Hanaway, the new attorney general in Missouri, called the new lawsuit an attempt to try to avoid paying up on the $24 billion and vowed to keep pressing for payment.

That includes seizing Chinese-owned assets.

Ms. Hanaway said her notice of judgment was submitted to the State Department for service on China last month.

“I find it extremely telling that the Chinese blame our great state for ‘belittling the social evaluation’ of the Wuhan Institute of Virology,” she said. “This lawsuit is a stalling tactic and tells me that we have been on the right side of this issue all along.”

Mr. Bailey is now deputy director at the FBI. The bureau declined to comment on his behalf.

The lawsuit was filed in the spring but the notice only served on Missouri last week. Mr. Schmitt was notified of it this week.

“This is their way of distracting from what the world already knows, China has blood on its hands,” the senator said in a news release announcing the action.

The documents Mr. Schmitt publicized this week included both a Chinese-language notice of the lawsuit and an English translation provided by the plaintiffs as part of the official notice of service.

A three-judge panel of the Intermediate People’s Court in Wuhan has been formed to hear the case. Jiang Ning is the presiding judge, with Yin Wei and Pei Lu joining.

The lawsuit names Mr. Schmitt as the “major contriver, promoter and implementer” of the denigration of Wuhan — which suggests that his original lawsuit was in fact the spur for the Chinese legal retaliation.

“Numerous openly-available information had proved that three defendants’ acts through malicious and vexatious litigation are totally defamation and libel, and have seriously infringed plaintiffs’ reputation rights, causing profound and extremely enormous losses to plaintiffs,” the lawsuit says.

Wuhan also rejected claims by U.S. officials that the lab had been uncooperative in helping sort out the origins of the virus.

The lawsuit pointed to more than 3,000 “medical workers” China deployed to 57 countries to assist with pandemic efforts, and COVID supplies China provided to 153 nations, including the U.S.

“China has always acted with openness, transparency and responsibility,” Wuhan said in its lawsuit.

U.S. officials, though, disagree with that assessment.

The inspector general for the Health and Human Services Department in 2023 concluded that the Wuhan lab refused to provide its lab notebooks or files on bat coronavirus experiments funded by American government money.

The government has since dropped the Wuhan lab from its list of institutions approved to receive U.S. money for animal experiments.

For more information, visit The Washington Times COVID-19 resource page.