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Larry Klayman, the OG vexatious litigant who literally sued his own mother, has just filed a federal claim against China for coronavirus. Because… 2020.
Sure, lots of weirdos talk smack on Reddit about COVID-19 being an illegal bioweapon which escaped from the Wuhan Institute of Virology. But only Larry Klayman is willing to draft an actual federal suit based on a 4chan conspiracy theory. Because Uncle Larry isn’t going to let a young whippersnapper like Devin Nunes take his title as America’s premier purveyor of bullshit lawsuits!
The named plaintiff is Texas’s Buzz Photos, which specializes in high school sports photos and purports to have “lost about $50,000 over the last weekend alone.” Klayman himself is both a party to the suit and the lawyer filing the purported class action, because why ever not? In it, he charges the Chinese Government, the People’s Liberation Army, the Wuhan Institute of Virology, and the Institute’s Director Shi Zhengli with wrongful death, assault and battery, material support for terrorism, negligence, and a conspiracy to injure and kill Americans.
Klayman’s claims, such as they are, rest on a Washington Times interview with virologist Dany Shoham, of Israel’s Bar Ilan University, who speculates that, “In principle, outward virus infiltration might take place either as leakage or as an indoor unnoticed infection of a person that normally went out of the concerned facility. This could have been the case with the Wuhan Institute of Virology, but so far there isn’t evidence or indication for such incident.”
Here on Planet Earth, the general consensus is that the virus jumped to humans as wild animals were butchered for sale at Wuhan’s “wet market.” The Wuhan Institute of Virology was the first to identify and publish the genetic sequence of the novel coronavirus and match it to samples taken from horseshoe bats in southwest China. Which is not entirely consistent with Mr. Klayman’s theory that the Institute created the disease as an illegal bioweapon and accidentally unleashed it, killing tens of thousands of their own countrymen and crashing the Chinese economy.
If we could separate it from the president’s “China virus” racism, pressuring China to keep these markets closed permanently would keep us all safer. The government has recently banned the sale and consumption of wild animals, which is great. But a similar ban imposed after the 2003 SARS outbreak was gradually relaxed, with the present disastrous effect.
Check out this video from Vox for a non-racist take on the subject.
And if you’re home day-drinking, what the hell, read this idiotic lawsuit, too. Have at it!
Buzz Photos v. People’s Republic of China [Class Action Complaint, No. 3:20-cv-00656-K (N. D. Tex., March 17, 2020)]
Dallas federal lawsuit accuses Chinese government of creating coronavirus as ‘biological weapon’ [Dallas Morning News]
Virus-hit Wuhan has two laboratories linked to Chinese bio-warfare program [Washington Times]
Elizabeth Dye lives in Baltimore where she writes about law and politics.