Doesn't seem like a breaking story to me.
Looking through university database gives over 200,000 hits for directed evolution of viruses, several being related to sars-cov-2, mrna, and trna. So it's a standard research program in virology going on at research institutions globally.
This seems more like an example of something that shocks everyone given a narrative and general ignorance towards a research field than something actually crazy or secretive.
Phizer release
According to phizer they are not conducting directed evolution research. it could be the case that given these things the guy describes is passed to him via meetings, he's not actually in the departments that conduct the real research, he may be passing a long an incorrect narrative. I've seen this before in research projects involving programmers and mathematicians.