Reply to Fedson

complicates the course of illness for many patients with influenza and accounts for some of its associated mortality [8]. Thus, prudent pandemic preparedness should include stockpiles of antibiotics, as well as vaccines and antiviral agents. But we should not stop there. The findings of Morens et al. [1] notwithstanding, poorly understood host factors surely explain much of what happened in 1918–1919 and what might happen again with the next pandemic [9]. Because most of the world’s people will not have access to pandemic vaccines and antiviral drugs, and many will also have difficulty obtaining antibiotics, other agents that target the host response must be sought [10]. For many, these widely available and inexpensive agents could mitigate the conditions that give rise to bacterial pneumonia.