When one set of ferrets was infected with both strains and then exposed to a second set,

none of the secondary ferrets contracted either a reassorted virus or even just H5N1. The scientists even used gene splicing to create a hybrid virus. Not only did the fabricated hybrids pass poorly between the animals, ferrets injected with the reassorted virus were less ill than those who received pure H5N1. Reassortment appears to have weakened the germ.

All of this also helps explain one of the least-known facts about H5N1. The strain’s discovery in poultry dates back not to 1997, as we’re constantly told, but rather to 1959 when it was identified in Scottish chickens.

In other words, we’ve been exposed to this thing for half a century and yet it’s refused to go pandemic.

Small increases in the counted numbers of bird-to-human cases over the last four years probably represent little more than better reporting. Yet virologist Robert Webster, perhaps the most respected of the alarmists, last November in the New England Journal of Medicine specifically cited the annual increases in bird-to-human H5N1 cases since 2002 as cause for alarm.

So what does it mean that, according to the WHO, throughout this year such cases have significantly lagged behind those of last year? You already know: “It’s even worse than we thought!”