Jaime Michos, and hundreds of people who have contracted the coronavirus in Mexico and other countries, are demanding financial damages from the World Health Organization and China, but without much hope of winning the case.
The 63-year-old retired joined the campaign launched by an Argentine law firm seeking that the World Health Organization and Beijing pay tens of thousands of dollars in compensation to families affected by the epidemic, which began two years ago in the Chinese city of Wuhan.
And the chances of the lawsuit succeeding are slim, according to what “AFP” reported, but it was not easy for Michaus, whose daughter died of Covid on July 23 at the age of 25, leaving her a few months old daughter.
The grieving father explained, “I have mixed feelings because it seems as if I want to profit from my daughter’s death,” considering that the chance of winning the case does not exceed “50 percent.” “Any money will not return my daughter to me but I am doing it for my granddaughter’s future,” he added.
She also joined the Buenos Aires law firm’s initiative, working at a gas station in Mexico, suffering from the effects of post-Covid-19.
“I am 35 years old. I have ringing in my ears, my eyes are blurry, and I have to use glasses,” she said, asking not to be named.
On its website, Poplavsky Law Firm says: “Have you been or are you currently infected or one of your relatives has COVID-19? You deserve compensation. File a complaint with us.” He asserts that he represents “practically a thousand victims in Argentina, the United States, Ecuador, Spain and Italy.”
He promised his clients economic compensation of “two hundred thousand dollars, if he contracted the disease and the effects were great, and 800 thousand dollars for death,” as stated by the lawyer, Denis Gonzalez, representative of the law firm in Mexico, told AFP.
The office confirms that it does not ask for any fees from its clients, explaining that it will cover its fees from a percentage cut from the default compensation.
The international law firm “Poblavsky” confirms that it submits requests for compensation to “the United Nations and the International Criminal Court once morest the People’s Republic of China and the World Health Organization for misdemeanour violations of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.”
He explains that the process can take at least five years.
But Marlec Ríos Nava, an expert in international law at the Autonomous University of Mexico, believes that “people know it won’t work,” explaining that the United Nations deals with complaints from states, not individuals.
Two years following the appearance of the first infections, the World Health Organization denies that it was late at the beginning of the epidemic in declaring a state of “public health emergency on an international scale” on January 30, 2020, and then a state of epidemic on March 11 of the same year.
“The WHO health emergency system was started immediately,” WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said at a press conference on Wednesday.
During 2021, the head of the World Health Organization requested additional investigations into a theory that the virus may have leaked from a laboratory at the Wuhan Institute of Virology. But Beijing has consistently rejected this hypothesis.
In Mexico, lawyer Fernando Martinez de Velasco is trying to sue China through its embassy in Mexico. But he has not yet collected thirty signatures, which constitute the minimum necessary to launch this procedure.
“I thought people would wait in line to complain, but it’s very strange that it didn’t happen,” de Velasco said.
“I think it’s a credibility issue,” he added, acknowledging that the chances of success for any move are slim.
