This makes sense. Find ways to anticipate variants before they occur in nature:
"We're exploring, like, you know how the virus keeps mutating? Well, one of the things we're exploring is like, why don't we just mutate it ourselves, so we could focus on, create, preemptively develop new vaccines, right?"
There is no context for this:
"We're not supposed to do gain-of-function with the viruses. They'd rather we not but we do these selected structure mutations to try to see if we can make them more potent"
Make what more potent? The virus or the vaccines?