Federal judge orders China to pay Missouri $24 billion in COVID-19 dispute

Jack Suntrup, St. Louis Post-Dispatch on Mar 9, 2025

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JEFFERSON CITY — A federal judge in Cape Girardeau has ordered Chinese defendants to pay Missouri over $24 billion after finding they hoarded personal protective equipment during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Senior U.S. District Judge Stephen Limbaugh Jr. said in a 32-page order Friday that Missouri showed defendants, including the People’s Republic of China and the Chinese Communist Party, hoarded PPE, violating federal law against monopolization or attempted monopolization of trade.

Limbaugh said the state’s evidence showed that defendants “engaged in monopolistic actions to hoard PPE through both the nationalization of U.S. factories and the direct hoarding of PPE manufactured or for sale in the United States.”

At the same time, the judgment said, China misled the world about the dangers and scope of the COVID-19 pandemic to facilitate and extend the hoarding campaign.

Limbaugh entered a $24.5 billion default judgment in Missouri’s favor after no defendants appeared at a trial last month in Cape Girardeau.

He said Missouri demonstrated it suffered significant harm in the form of lost net general tax revenue that would’ve been collected but-for the hoarding and showed heightened state expenditures on PPE caused by hoarding totaling nearly $123 million.

“Missouri has submitted substantial evidence ... demonstrating that Missourians were forced to both pay higher prices for the limited PPE available and suffer the effects of PPE shortages,” Limbaugh said.

A spokesperson for China’s U.S. Embassy slammed the lawsuit in a statement Friday and threatened “reciprocal countermeasures” if the country’s interests are harmed.

“The so-called lawsuit has no basis in fact, law or international precedence. China does not and will not accept it. If China’s interests are harmed, we will firmly take reciprocal countermeasures according to international law,” embassy spokesperson Liu Pengyu told the Post-Dispatch in a statement Friday.

China and the United States already are fighting over trade. The Trump administration has imposed flat tariffs of 20% of all Chinese imports, while China has countered with additional 15% duties on key U.S. imports.

Missouri’s lawsuit dates to April 2020, when then-Attorney General Eric Schmitt, a Republican, sued China over the COVID-19 pandemic. At the time, state officials warned of possible retaliation including potential cyberattacks, the Post-Dispatch reported.

In a statement Friday, current Missouri Attorney General Andrew Bailey, a Republican, called the decision a “landmark victory.”

“China refused to show up to court, but that doesn’t mean they get away with causing untold suffering and economic devastation,” he said. “We intend to collect every penny by seizing Chinese-owned assets, including Missouri farmland.”

Chinese-owned Smithfield Foods, a leading pork processer, owns an estimated 40,000 acres of Missouri farmland.

Bailey inherited the case when he was named attorney general, succeeding Schmitt who joined the U.S. Senate in 2023.

In a social media post Friday, Schmitt applauded the ruling. “Just call us the Show Me (the money) state,” Schmitt wrote.

Limbaugh in 2022 tossed Missouri’s lawsuit, but an appeals panel ruled in 2024 that one of the state’s claims could proceed — that defendants hoarded personal protective equipment while knowing and suppressing the dangers of COVID-19.

Limbaugh said Missouri claimed $123 million in damages in the form of heightened PPE expenditures between April 22, 2020 and the end of 2020.

Missouri also claimed $8.04 billion in direct lost tax revenue due to the hoarding. Added together, Missouri’s damages exceeded $8.16 billion and is entitled to a judgment valued at three-times that amount, Limbaugh said.

He applied the $24.5 billion judgment “jointly and severally” to the nine defendants in the case, along with a 3.91% post-judgment interest rate compounded annually.

In addition to the People’s Republic of China and the ruling Communist Party, the defendants are the National Health Commission of the People’s Republic of China, Ministry of Emergency Management of the People’s Republic of China, Ministry of Civil Affairs of the People’s Republic of China, People’s Government of Hubai Province, People’s Government of Wuhan City, Wuhan Institute of Virology and the Chinese Academy of Sciences.

Limbaugh, 73, a veteran jurist who also served on the Missouri Supreme Court, is a cousin of the late political commentator Rush Limbaugh. He became a federal judge in 2008 and assumed senior status in 2020.