Mississippi’s attorney general announced on Wednesday that she is preparing to file a lawsuit against the Chinese regime to hold it accountable for “malicious and dangerous acts” that she claims caused the CCP virus pandemic, which resulted in widespread human and economic devastation in the United States and internationally.

Attorney General Lynn Fitch said her case, which will be filed on behalf of the state, will seek damages under the Foreign Sovereign Immunities Act (FSIA). Normally, Americans are barred from suing another country because of the doctrine of sovereign immunity, which is a legal rule that insulates countries from being sued in other countries’ courts.

The FSIA provides for certain situations where private individuals in the United States can sue a foreign country for its actions in its list of exemptions.

Fitch claims that the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) cover-up of the virus in the early stages of the pandemic had resulted in the suffering seen today in Mississippi. There are over 4,700 cases in the state as of Wednesday, and 183 deaths, according to the state’s health department.

“[The CCP] must not be allowed to act with impunity. Mississippians deserve justice and I will seek that in court,” Fitch said in a statement.

This comes after Missouri Attorney General Eric Schmitt said on Tuesday that he had filed a lawsuit in the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Missouri against the communist regime, alleging that the Chinese authorities’ actions led to harsh effects and deaths in the state. Missouri is the first state in the country to launch a lawsuit against the CCP.

That lawsuit (pdf) alleged that Chinese authorities had suppressed crucial information, arrested whistleblowers, made misrepresentations about the transmissibility of COVID-19—the disease caused by the CCP virus, destroyed medical research, and hoarded personal protective equipment.

“The Chinese government lied to the world about the danger and contagious nature of COVID-19, silenced whistleblowers, and did little to stop the spread of the disease. They must be held accountable for their actions,” Schmitt said.

The Chinese regime responded to the Missouri lawsuit on Wednesday, dismissing the legal basis of the lawsuit and calling it “absurd.”

Cover Up

Between mid-December and mid-January, the Chinese regime displayed a pattern of behavior of withholding information and making misrepresentations about the severity of the disease. There was evidence that the CCP had failed to expeditiously provide the World Health Organization (WHO) with important information about the virus, such as the transmissibility of the virus, details of the virus’s genome, and infection of healthcare workers. Experts have found that this lack of transparency and candor hindered the international response to the virus.

One study, currently in preprint from researchers at the University of Southhampton in the UK, found that if Chinese authorities had acted three weeks earlier, the number of cases could have been reduced by 95 percent.

The Chinese regime was also not responsive to international requests to learn about the virus and the outbreak. U.S. Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar previously said the United States had been trying to send a group of experts to understand the outbreak’s transmission and severity since Jan. 6. However, the United States’s repeated offers were left unanswered for a month.

Moreover, when multiple Wuhan doctors attempted to warn their colleagues and the public about a “pneumonia with an unknown cause,” later known to be the CCP virus, authorities attempted to silence them and reprimanded them for “rumor-mongering.” The most notable of them was Dr. Li Wenliang, an ophthalmologist who ultimately succumbed to the disease after contracting it from a patient he was treating.

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