I'm not entirely clear on the scenarios in which this type of research would be beneficial (I'm a physician):

- AFAIK research on vaccines does not require altering an organism to make it more lethal. You would want to cover as broad a spectrum of serotypes/serovars of the existing organism as possible. I can see how someone might argue that you could pre-empt a more malignant variant but surely this is outweighed by the likelihood of creating systemic risk.

- What exactly would we learn form creating new, highly virulent organisms that can't be learned using the same technology on non-virulent organisms?

- It bothers me that this is a push to create more biological weapons from the military complex (especially terrifying considering the infantile intellects we currently have in congress).