“There has been a little flu, but there will be more…we have not seen the worst of it, flu usually peaks in February,” said an article in The Philadelphia Inquirer in January. Now in February, we think – people better get their flu shots, take vitamin C and heed the public health cautions plastered across the news media. But what impact do these public health messages actually have on us? Are we going to race out and get our flu shot? According to a Drexel University communication researcher, probably not. And it’s not because we think we’re invincible, it’s because we like to think we’re immune to the influences of messages in the mass media — a communications theory termed the “third-person effect.”