Chinese Court Hears Wuhan Labs COVID Defamation Suit Against Missouri

The Wuhan lab at the center of questions about COVID-19’s origin says Missouri defamed it by suing China over the pandemic, and a Chinese court has begun hearing its demand for more than $50 billion. The Wuhan Intermediate People’s Court said in a Nov. 2 notice that it held a public hearing on Oct. 30.In Missouri’s case, a U.S. federal judge found last year that Chinese authorities concealed what they knew about the virus in the pandemic’s early days and used the time to hoard protective equipment. The FBI, CIA, and Energy Department have each assessed that the pandemic more likely began with a lab accident than through natural spillover. Beijing denies this.The Wuhan Institute of Virology’s co-plaintiffs are Wuhan’s city government and the Chinese Academy of Sciences, which oversees the lab. The defendants are the state, former Attorneys General Eric Schmitt and Andrew Bailey, and current Attorney General Catherine Hanaway, whom the court added in December 2025 at the plaintiffs’ request. Schmitt is now a Republican senator from Missouri, and Bailey later served as co-deputy director of the FBI.The plaintiffs accuse the four defendants of carrying out “malicious and abusive litigation” in the United States, spreading false information, and making stigmatizing and discriminatory remarks that damaged their reputations and caused heavy losses, according to the court notice. They want the defendants to stop, apologize publicly, and pay damages.Wuhan police leveled a similar charge early in the outbreak at Li Wenliang, an eye doctor at a city hospital, reprimanding him for “spreading fake information on the internet” after he warned colleagues about the virus. Li died of COVID-19 in February 2020, and China’s top anti-graft agency later ruled the reprimand improper.The suit seeks 356.4 billion yuan, which the Missouri attorney general’s office put at $50.5 billion when it was notified of the case last December. The plaintiffs also want apologies published in outlets including The New York Times, CNN, The Wall Street Journal, and Chinese state-run People’s Daily.The Wuhan court, like every court in China, answers to the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), which oversees the judiciary through its political and legal affairs commissions. The court said it is still hearing the case, and it was not immediately clear whether Missouri took part.The Epoch Times reached out to Hanaway’s office for comment but did not receive a response by publication time.The US JudgmentMissouri officials describe the Wuhan lawsuit as retaliation for the lawsuit Schmitt filed against China on the state’s behalf in April 2020. When Hanaway’s office announced last December that Missouri had been sued in Wuhan, she called the suit a stalling tactic and vowed to keep pressing to collect the state’s judgment.In March 2025, after the Chinese defendants failed to appear, Senior U.S. District Judge Stephen Limbaugh Jr. entered a default judgment of about $24.5 billion against the Chinese regime, the CCP, and related entities. He accepted Missouri’s estimate of more than $8 billion in damages and tripled it, as federal antitrust law allows.Beijing has rejected the ruling. Liu Pengyu, a spokesman for the Chinese Embassy in Washington, told The Associated Press in a statement last year that China’s pandemic response involved “acts of national sovereignty” that are not subject to U.S. courts.Hanaway’s office sent the judgment to the State Department in November 2025 to be served on China through diplomatic channels. The state must complete that step before it can ask the court to let it seize Chinese-owned assets. Legal scholars doubt either side will ever collect: Federal law protects most Chinese government property in the United States from seizure, and Missouri likely owns nothing in China that a Wuhan court could take.In August, two of the Chinese defendants—the Hubei provincial government and the Chinese Academy of Sciences—appeared in the U.S. case for the first time and asked Judge Limbaugh to throw out the judgment. They argue that as government bodies, they are immune from lawsuits, that they were not properly served, and that the award rests on antitrust claims Missouri never formally raised.Schmitt said last December that he had been banned from China and was now being sued by it. He said he would “wear it like a badge of honor.”