A President Who Understands Things and can Explain Them

.... Ah how nice it is to have one like that - remember the last guy? Here's Obama on the pig flu:

somebody asked, why is this different from other flus? We don't know for certain that this will end up being more severe than other seasonal flus that we have had. It's been noted I think before that you have over 36,000 die on average every year from seasonal flus; you've have 200,000 hospitalizations.

It may turn out that H1N1 runs its course like ordinary flus, in which case we will have prepared and we won't need all these preparations. The reason that people are concerned is -- the scientists are concerned -- is this is a new strain. So what happens is, is that Americans and people around the world have not built up immunity in the same way that they've built up immunity to the seasonal flus that we're accustomed to. Those seasonal flus may change, mutate slightly from year to year, but they're all roughly in the same band. When you have a new strain, then potentially our immune systems can't deal with it as effectively. And there are indications that in Mexico, at least, what you saw were relatively young, healthy people die from these -- from the H1N1, rather than people whose immune system is already compromised -- older individuals, very small infants, and so forth.