My (possibly incorrect) understanding is that the only thing about the viruses which is important is that their capsules greatly increase the surface area; the

My (possibly incorrect) understanding is that the only thing about the viruses which is important is that their capsules greatly increase the surface area; the genetic material inside is completely unnecessary. It is therefor an extremely small stretch of the imagination to suppose that they could be produced in massive quantities simply by adding a plasmid to bacteria which contains only the genetic code necessary for the creation of the capsule, which would in theory prevent them from being infectious. Some viral capsules do require dna or rna to be present inside them to function, however, so there are likely flaws in this idea, but keeping them nonvirulent would be a fairly simple matter.