You’re conflating two different things. Peter Daszak’s original statements and articles about COVID and its origins last year led to a significant amount of pressure within the scientific community to not even look for a possible origin involving human error coming from a lab leak. The Lancet letter, being published by one of the most prestigious journals in the world, firmly established that COVID had a natural origin, and the media picked that up as evidence to rail against any possibility of a lab based origin. You can look at many of the articles published in the wake of the Lancet letter discrediting the lab leak, like Vox’s here: https://www.vox.com/2020/4/23/21226484/wuhan-lab-coronavirus... that literally quotes Daszak and Dennis Carroll, another signee of the Lancet letter who directly and without question say a lab leak is preposterous and unlikely. Is that good enough direct evidence for scientists pressuring the global discourse against a lab leak?

Direct evidence of guilt is going to be hard considering the CPC’s reticence to allow an independent investigation, which honestly is another point in my opinion towards a lab leak. But regardless, regardless! When you combine the following facts:

1. There was a lab in Wuhan studying bat-related coronaviruses in gain of function research.

2. The virus was well adapted to humans at the beginning of the pandemic, very uncharacteristic of a zoonotic spillover.

3. The virus had no evidence of a natural origin then and it still doesn’t despite ones being found for MERS and SARS-1 within a few months.

4. Of the first 40 or so cases, not all could be definitively linked to the wet market that the CPC said the virus originated in.

How could we not take a lab leak seriously? All 4 of those facts were true even last year, though 3 was a bit weaker since we’d only had a few months since case 0 and not the year and a half we do now. Our social media platforms should NEVER have been silencing this debate, and it’s absolutely ridiculous that its still even remotely controversial to bring it up. Calling it a conspiracy theory, when the questions I’m asking are profound and grounded in science that’s well agreed upon, does nobody any favors.

Edit:

For those who don’t read my original source, Daszak is the head of an organization EcoHealth Alliance that directly partnered with the WIV to study gain of function using bat-originated coronaviruses.