Rather than modifying viruses and seeing what happens in the hope that that will inform us for the next pandemic, it seems smarter to start making more vaccines with different techniques where mistakes are lower-stakes and the benefit is more clear.
Some of these fears and comments reminds me a lot of comments around the nuclear accident in Japan. The actual issues stemmed from poor safety measures and protocols, not nuclear itself. That's assuming that the lab leak theory is even true and not just a convenient tool for politicians to use as a wedge.
This is where I see a gap. How does it actually inform vaccine design? Are there not enough wild viruses to play with?
Sun Tzu.
How do you think you can devise a vaccine if you don't know the virus? They experiment to find out what are the weaknesses of the enemy (i.e. proteins and other markers), so that they can target it. If the next pandemy is caused by a similar strain: ta-dam you have the vaccine already (or at least you know what to target).
It seems like the GoF research shows a lot of "oh look we made a super virus. It would be very bad if a virus did this in nature." Perhaps we can get some data on specifically _how bad_ that particular function would be. What do we get beyond that? Like you said, are there any other benefits that outweigh the risks?
Maybe we're all just really bad at understanding risks. I see a lot of comparisons between nuclear power. We know exactly how much dangerous material is in a nuclear reactor. Those physics don't evolve. Nuclear material doesn't reproduce and reinfect endlessly. A nuclear power plant needs a chain of failure to be harmful. A virus only needs one particle to infect.