The Wuhan Institute of Virology is still operational and likely still undertaking gain-of-function research to develop coronaviruses that are more lethal and contagious, former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said on Tuesday’s edition of SiriusXM’s Breitbart News Daily with host Alex Marlow, author of Breaking the News: Exposing the Establishment Media’s Hidden Deals and Secret Corruption.

Identification of the novel coronavirus’s origin should be a priority of the U.S. government from both global health and national security perspectives, Pompeo held.

“We shouldn’t forget this lab is still up and running,” he said. “There [are] no increased safety measures that I’m aware of. I’m sure they are still conducting viral research, probably gain-of-function research inside this lab, making these viruses more lethal and more transmissible. This risk is not gone. This is a serious and urgent matter. We have to confront it in a way that reflects that.”

Pompeo noted that “unanswered questions” remained about the outbreak’s origins.

He stated, “I’m confident that we will conclude that this came from the virology lab, but put that aside. [We] know that the Chinese Communist Party allowed this virus to escape from Wuhan. They allowed folks to travel to Milan and outside of Hubei province and foisted this virus that killed three million people around the world upon us all. [They] continue to cover it up to this day.”

That is enough,” he continued, “That level of malfeasance is enough.”

Pompeo noted the political corruption of the World Health Organization given its status as a subsidiary of the United Nations.

“What are the kinds of things we can do?” Pompeo considered. “We left the World Health Organization. What a joke to sit beside them at a meeting and have them pretend to be part of the global effort to end pandemics, when in fact they were the providers of the pandemic and covered it up. So, first thing you should do is … get out of the W.H.O. and demand that the world build out a system to prevent this from happening again that doesn’t include the arsonist who is setting all the fires.”

Chinese Communist Party officials should not be able to travel or send their families to the U.S., Pompeo advised.

He remarked, “We know the decision makers inside of the CCP — the Chinese Communist Party — who continue to cover this up. We should do everything we can to make sure their kids don’t go to our schools, and their spouses don’t shop in America. All simple things, but I assure you, those Chinese leaders want their families to be here in the United States. We should deny them that.”

“We should impose enormous costs on the local leaders who permitted this to happen and then we should also demand that the world join together and impose harsh trade costs on the Chinese until they permit us to conduct the research needed to figure out who patient zero was, and to make sure that this lab is fixed,” he added.

Pompeo went on, “If this was something that the Chinese were working on, and if it was in any way potentially connected to the military work that they were doing at that site, there are even more questions and more risk to the world. It’s one thing for the [New York Times and Washington Post] to mock Mike Pompeo for a theory that was based on science. It’s another thing for us to continue to hide our heads in the sand and play politics with this important issue. We can’t let that happen.”

He concluded, “We’ve got to figure out how this came to be, and we have to stop the Chinese Communist Party from doing the kinds of things that could next time kill not three million, but 30 million.”

Breitbart News Daily broadcasts live on SiriusXM Patriot 125 weekdays from 6:00 a.m. to 9:00 a.m. Eastern.