Well it’s not mutating the virus they found in initial cases is still the same as the one at present in Patients in Europe and USA.
The premise of article is actually not novel, it’s the way vaccines are made. Smallpox way of developing vaccine in crude way without scientific understanding was done in the early years, now we have come very far.
This virus is really novel that’s the reason novel corona virus (covid-19). Scientists and research community are frantically searching for a vaccine or treatment plan to manage it. So far there is a very limited understanding. Hope can find some way to treat it, otherwise only solution left is relying on herd immunity.
The premise of using an attenuated virus as a vaccine is not novel, but the idea of using genome sequencing to find an attenuated strain and showing through epidemiology that it is safe does seem to be novel.
Even if it doesn’t pan out I think it is worth trying.