A paper that carries out the H5N8 North American analysis using the same methodology as my rejected paper.

There have been just so many H5N8 papers that I did not pay much attention to this one about H5N8 in North America, but it should have been included as a  reference to the reassortment and sporadic outbreaks paper that keeps getting rejected.

This shows that the H5N8 in North America is in multiple clades by doing the exact analysis that referee 1 of version 2 said was flawed. This shows that the comment on a flawed method cannot be true because a paper has been published using the exact method in dispute. I then went on to show why this is incomplete and misses reassortment events but the referee chose to ignore this. Not mentioning this paper was a mistake. However the referees arguments about wrong methodology are an even bigger mistake. Except I do not think they were a mistake I think that they were dishonesty.