Can’t study how to fight extremely fatal viruses without extremely fatal viruses. Also recombining the flu in lab conditions gives them better ability to predict normal flu mutations, so maybe we could actually start making flu vaccines for the ACTUAL strains that will be spreading rather than best guessing (usually wrong).
“Can’t study how to fight extremely fatal viruses without extremely fatal viruses.”
There are plenty of existing lethal viruses that can be used without making new ones UNLESS you are going to use them for vaccine development or to study the mechanism of pathogenesis. Even so as a long term Biosafety officer I would not have approved this work in a BSL 2 lab. Working with unknown lethal viruses that are communicable and for which there is no known treatment is BSL3 or BSL4 level work.