As the virus spread, a mother I knew in Florida reported that her entire family had just had the H1N1 flu and it was not any worse than a bad cold. Another mother in Chicago told me that her friend’s healthy nineteen-year-old son had suffered a stroke after being hospitalized with the flu. I believed both of these stories, but they told me nothing more than what the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention already seemed to be trying to tell me—the flu could be harmless in some cases and serious in others. Under the circumstances, vaccination began to seem prudent.
