they're going to do something that is completely against/opposite any and all products or direction they have ever made or gone? I'll believe it when I see it!

They don't have the best track record on original products :)

This is just an example of a membrane permeable dye for ATP detection. They are just looking at cells grown in cell culture media....

While this is cool, it is far from a replacement for animal models. For example, this would be useless to test the immune system response to a pathogen. It wouldn't let you determine how a bacterial pathogen enters its host and disseminates through the body. It wouldn't let you see what blood stream levels are produced for a given oral dose of a drug.

Animal research sucks... but so does disease. No one does animal research because they enjoy it (well, OK maybe a few crazies out there).

They didn't specifically modify the virus if I understand the article correctly. They simply passaged it many times through a ferret host. Selective pressure caused the mutations leading the to increased transmission ability. The virus's DNA was then sequenced to find the mutations. All of them were known mutations found in nature, but just not in the same viral genome until that point. That knowledge is important for scientists working on infectious disease.

They didn't set out to introduce specific mutations in an attempt to make a super virus. While the result is somewhat similar, the means to the end are important here.
An analogy would be a lab constructing a strain of S. aureus that is vancomycin and methicillin resistant, vs reporting the seqeuce of genes responsible for a natural isolate found to show that phenotype.

Learning more about disease is the only way to prevent/treat it. Burying our heads in the sand and pretending that everything will be OK just isn't going to cut it.

Because the poor overworked doctor that you are seeing has to be able to pay back the $300K in debt they owe to the government. Until we fundamentally change the way doctors are trained and, more importantly, who funds the bill, nothing is going to change.