In this regard, we carefully calibrated our combined infection model so that the toxicity we observed with H1N1 alone was not exacerbated with MRSA (Figure 4) in zinc‐repleted mice; the combined infection, however, greatly increased acute lung injury (as determined by protein in BAL postmortem and the gene expression of Sftpc and Scgb1a1) in zinc‐depleted mice. Here, SFTPC is linked to infection.