Missouri GOP Sen. Eric Schmitt says a $50 billion lawsuit against him by a consortium of Chinese entities related to the COVID-19 pandemic is retaliatory and "totally ridiculous."

At issue is a lawsuit Missouri filed when Schmitt was the state's attorney general alleging China hoarded personal protective equipment during the early months of the pandemic, harming the state and its residents, according to ABC News. 

A federal judge ruled for Missouri earlier this year after China declined to participate in the trial. 

Missouri recently escalated its efforts to collect by asking the State Department to formally notify China that Missouri intends to pursue assets to satisfy the judgment.

"Missouri got a $24 billion judgment against them, and they don't like that," Schmitt told Fox News on Dec. 17. "They unleashed COVID on the world. We sued them, and we won."

The counter-suit was filed by the People’s Government of Wuhan Municipality, the Chinese Academy of Sciences and the Wuhan Institute of Virology of the Chinese Academy of Sciences.

 Attorney General Catherine Hanaway recently called the lawsuit a stalling tactic [that] tells me that we have been on the right side of this issue all along."

The lawsuit, first obtained by Fox News Digital, accused Schmitt, FBI co-deputy director Andrew Bailey and the state of Missouri of damaging the reputations of China, Wuhan and the associated research facilities through "malicious vexatious litigation, fabricating enormous disinformation, and spreading stigmatizing and discriminating slanders."

The Central Intelligence Agency said in January that the pandemic was more likely to have emerged from a lab than from nature.