Whatever chilling effect it had, tall order at this stage of this general program of research or not, it's high time its advocates including yourself point to tangible progress of one sort or another, for we now can reasonably assess the risk side of the risk benefit trade off.
See this comment https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27398081 on why the advancements in vaccines don't even begin to cover the risks, or note as of now how long it looks it'll be before the Third World gets vaccinated against as much as is humanly possible, no sooner than sometime in 2022. Consider the possibility of a sufficiently good escape variant requiring another dose or two.
Consider how little the the whole world can afford the expense of a pandemic, and the Third World in particular, including viral surveillance of any sort, "molecular" (PRC based) tests or sequencing samples. And this time they're lucky, COVID-19 mortality risks are highly weighted with age, something that hits the young harder will hit them a lot harder.
Consider how many possible, probable, or proven lab escapes will it take before the world's governments clamp down on a lot more than gain of function research.
Yes, nature wants to kill us, although your itemized points also address that issue. It's just not very good at it, and almost all of that was before the germ theory of disease was accepted in the end of the 19th Century.