"It is important to note that these studies are required by U.S. and global regulators for all antiviral products" - i think this bit of the paragraph you highlighted changes the meaning somewhat.
big pharma definitely isn't known for handing large sums of money to regulators and outright creating many regulations to entrench themselves and creating a moat for startups. These multi-billion dollar multinational corporations having nothing but the publics best interest at heart and don't care about profit at all
In addition to the fact that pharma tends to write their own regulations, as ren_engineer pointed out, it's ambiguous what "these studies" refers to. It could refer only to the "in vitro resistance selection experiments" mentioned, and not require gain-of-function engineering - a requirement I would find highly surprising.
It is laughable that the conservatives/Republicans/Fascists of my country (US) are all against evil X. And they literally do not understand what evil X is. But they are indeed against it.
It is hard to see what the end game of this nonsense. I am sure there is an ending part to it but so far it is just dummies saying gain of function over and over hoping it sticks.