Going back more than ten years now, scientists in the US and Holland have been trying to create a deadly human pathogen from avian influenza (HPA1). Yep.... there is a programme to turn bird flu, which does not normally infect people into a human flu.
You won't be surprised to know that many scientists (myself included) are totally opposed to this. In 2014 a group of scientists created The Cambridge Working Group and signed a document warning of the dangers of this research. Hundreds of academics at US and European universities signed it.
Later in 2014 the US government called for a pause in this dreadfully dangerous research. The National Institute of Health (NIH) Director at the time said his agency would study risks and benefits before proceeding further.
We now discover that the NIH has been quietly allowed the research to start again from an article in Science Magazine.
Jocelyn Kaiser in Science Magazine
When I first heard about this I thought it was going to be one of those mis-reports of research to establish the risk/possibility of particular strains mutating and crossing species, but to deliberately create it to (so they say) stockpile vaccines is utterly daft because those stockpiles wouldn't be necessary if they didn't create their new deadly strain in the first place.
Then of course the effectiveness of any vaccine would be dependent on their strain being the same or similar enough to any real strain that does somehow cross the divide without extensive manipulation.
Researching risk and prevention - good. Creating deadly plague, not good.