Hey, Remember Those Wacky Dutch Scientists Who Weaponized Bird Flu To Kill Half The World's Population?

 I had forgotten about Ron Fouchier until a friend sent an article from the journal Science. But sure enough we had November 2011's "UPDATED--"Dutch Scientists Have Genetically Altered the H5N1 Bird Flu Virus to Make it More Contagious" (could kill half humanity)" and then when they wanted to publish the recipe and the U.S. said no: "Psychotic Dutch Scientists: "Killer flu doctors: US censorship is a danger to science".

Our outro from that long ago post was 

"The U.S. National Institutes of Health funded the research. They own it. If Fouchier doesn't understand the implications of publication the NIH had to step in. This is just nuts." 

And the article from Science?

March 9, 2012

Surprising Twist in Debate Over Lab-Made H5N1

Ron Fouchier (left) and Anthony Fauci urged people

to rethink threat posed by engineered bird flu at a

recent meeting in Washington, D.C.

CREDIT: MICROBEWORLD.ORG

For the past several months, the media, the public, scientific groups, and a key U.S. government advisory panel on biosecurity have wrestled with how to deal with two unpublished studies they thought described the creation of a bird flu virus capable of triggering an influenza pandemic with the potential to kill millions of people. The New York Times even billed it as a “doomsday virus.” But now, a researcher who created one of the H5N1 mutants and a leading U.S. health official say the threat has been blown out of proportion, offering what they said were clarifications and “new data” to better gauge the risk it presents. Contrary to widespread reports, the researcher, Ron Fouchier of Erasmus MC in Rotterdam, the Netherlands, revealed that the virus made in his lab does not kill ferrets infected by the aerosol route. And it is more difficult to transmit the virus than Fouchier previously described....

.... At the ASM meeting, NSABB acting chair Paul Keim of Northern Arizona University in Flagstaff led the discussion with Fouchier; fellow NSABB member Michael Osterholm of the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities; Science Editor-in-Chief Bruce Alberts; and Anthony Fauci, who heads the U.S. National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, which funded both experiments.... 

....MUCH MORE

My friend said he had one of my trademarked—slow-on-the-uptake—"Saaaaayyy" reactions.

Thank you so much, friend who shall not be named.