FPI / June 16, 2021
Geostrategy-Direct
“There should be a cost imposed” for what China “did wrong” throughout every stage of the Covid-19 pandemic, former U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said.
Those costs, Pompeo said, should include shutting down the Wuhan Institute of Virology, where the virus most likely originated; imposing sanctions on the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) and its leader Xi Jinping; and freezing the financial assets of China’s global infrastructure program called the Belt and Road Initiative.
In an interview with security correspondent Bill Gertz, Pompeo said he has “high confidence” in an assessment published by the State Department in January linking the Wuhan lab to the Chinese military.
Pompeo, former CIA director, was among the first government officials to bring to light the strong possibility that Covid-19 spread following an accident or viral escape from the Wuhan laboratory rather than naturally from an animal host.
“I was in a position where we could see the accumulating evidence,” Pompeo said in the Washington Times report on June 14.
“Every piece of evidence that we turned over, every rock that we pulled up suggested that this virology lab had all the hallmarks of a place where this could have leaked.”
Pompeo said one of the most important actions that should be taken is for the international community to demand that the Wuhan Institute of Virology be shut down.
“That lab’s still open. That lab is still operating with the same crappy biosafety level that it had before this pandemic,” said Pompeo, who added that he is convinced the lab is still conducting dangerous viral research.
“If they are doing gain-of-function research, the next time it could be more lethal, more contagious,” he said.
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