Nope, a panel of virologists and related researchers with the same scientific understanding in the field should make these decisions.

It's ok to have wishful thinking. Plenty of grants include virologists and epidemiologists, so your proposal isn't practical.

Sure, they could provide anecdotal input based on past outbreaks, but they don't have the biological expertise to decide solely on what research should or could be carried out.

Anecdotally, that's not my experience with epi people. A fair few come from a bio/medicine background with a sufficient amount of experience in wet lab and theory to be considered a 'double threat'. Choose your own team.

"Anecdotally"

That was a reference to your previous comment. Does anecdotal count for nothing? Fine, run a survey of virologists and epidemiologists and report the intersection of set. It will not be arbitrarily small.

I looked through the grant. To my eye, I consider some of the participants as epidemiologists.