"Also, current plans are to expand worldwide collaboration on risky virus research sixfold, through the $1.2 billion Global Virome Project. Shouldn’t we figure out if this research sparked the pandemic before drastically expanding it?"
It doesn't at all look "like a conspiracy theory". Many past lab leaks have been documented (edit: https://twitter.com/Ayjchan/status/1394327678136852488), there had been widespread debate among virologists for years about whether the risk of a lab leak was too high to fund such research, the Obama administration banned it for a while for that reason, the State Department had expressed concerns about lax safety at the Wuhan lab, and so on. It's a perfectly reasonable hypothesis. If anything "looks like a conspiracy theory" it's the way that the topic was so harshly suppressed for the last year. I don't think that was a conspiracy either, though, I think it was just political polarization. Hopefully the winds are shifting now to reduce that, on this particular issue.
What's particularly significant and hasn't much been commented on yet is that Ralph Baric, the leading American collaborator of the bat coronavirus research at Wuhan, has signed the letter. He also (according to the OP) declined to comment further. That seems more like integrity.
> No, all the choices have already been made. The data have already been destroyed
You don't know that. You'd need an investigation to conclude that. Using it as an excuse not to investigate seems like assuming the conclusion.
Even if some data have been destroyed, it doesn't follow that every last piece of data everywhere has. Who knows what might turn out to be significant? There may well be relevant data in many countries, too, since the research was international.
The current plan is to 6x the funding for gain-of-function research, from $200 million to $1.2 billion, in the name of pandemic prevention. That's one serious reason for wanting to investigate whether gain-of-function research may have caused the current one.
The risks of such research have been in open debate for years, and the Obama administration even banned it for a while. It's not a far-fetched possibility, and it's a shame that the discussion about it became such a political casualty for the first year or so. The fact that heads are cooling a little now is clearly the precondition for scientists to be able to start writing letters like the OP.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/global-opinions/cong...