Everyone loves an underdog but I can not imagine that this could possibly work. Why do you think bio-hackers could come up with something that thousands of smart people in the industry could not? The money would almost certainly be better spent on upgrading production facilities in advance and starting vaccine production long before approval. This has the risk that they might need to trash everything if the trial is not successful but in the case it is, production has a headstart.
Your argument may be too strong - you're suggesting that big companies or the professional class of responsible people always does things better. But HN is founded on many examples of that not being true.
i.e. if your argument applies word for word against Semmelweis (who advocated hand-washing) or doubters against other earlier amateur vaccines, it it will fall victim to what we now know about those older cases, when the at-the-time experts were wrong.
In this case I wouldn't say that the reason this kind of research is valuable is anything related to medicine per se - but more that it can show the value of the much lower liability level he operates in, and how it means that amateurs can make massive cuts in preparing and defending from lawsuits. Example: if a company realized that only food-quality ingredients were required, not lab-quality, would it be worth it for them to justify that to the FDA and spend millions on it? probably not. My hypothesis for what's going on in general in medicine is this effect times a thousand, at every stage of development.
