A Missouri judge has found China’s communist leadership liable in a multibillion-dollar case over the regime’s hoarding of medical supplies during the COVID-19 pandemic.
“This is a landmark victory for Missouri and the United States in the fight to hold China accountable for unleashing COVID-19 on the world,” Missouri Attorney General Andrew Bailey said in a statement.
The State of Missouri brought the case against China, its communist leadership, and several subordinate departments and institutions—including the Wuhan Institute of Virology, where some intelligence leaders believe that the virus that causes COVID-19 originated.
District Judge Stephen Limbaugh Jr. rendered the decision by default after officials from the CCP did not appear to plead their side of the case, a common outcome in cases dealing with foreign entities.
The judgment took particular care to underscore the CCP’s role in obfuscating information about the virus early on during the initial outbreak in China, as well as the regime’s efforts to hoard personal protective equipment (PPE), causing shortages in the United States.
The case found that “China engaged in a campaign to suppress information about the existence, scope, and then human-to-human transmissibility, of COVID-19,” according to the judgment.
“China’s pattern of actions strongly suggests that it had knowledge of the existence and human-to-human transmission of the COVID-19 virus as early as September 2019 ... [and] engaged in a deliberate campaign to suppress information about the COVID-19 pandemic in order to support its campaign to hoard PPE from Missouri and an unsuspecting world,” the judgment reads.
The judgment also cites a U.S. State Department fact sheet from 2021 that notes that the CCP devoted “enormous resources to deceit and disinformation” about the virus in order to cover up the origins of COVID-19 and obscure the CCP’s role in the early handling of the outbreak.
Evidence brought against the CCP by Missouri expands on that by supplying evidence that the regime began quarantining doctors and their families in Wuhan in late 2019, despite maintaining that there was no evidence of human-to-human transmissibility until the end of January 2020.
It was with this secret knowledge of the virus, the judgment found, that the CCP began gobbling up global supplies of PPE and other medical equipment, depleting supplies in Australia, Canada, and the United States before those nations understood the gravity of the virus emerging in China.
“During the early months of the pandemic, Missouri spent millions more on PPE than it otherwise would have because of Defendants’ hoarding,” the judgment reads.
In all, the evidence compiled by Missouri found that the state had lost more than $8 billion related to PPE alone, because of both inflated prices and tax revenue losses.
Further, the state found that the CCP had fulfilled treble statute requirements, thereby permitting the court to triple the amount of the damages to more than $24 billion plus a compounding interest of a little less than 4 percent.
“Missouri is leading the fight,” he wrote.
