It is only through the grace of a merciful God and the tireless efforts of dying doctor Henry Dawson and his small band of believers, not the Allied leadership, that the world of WWII never saw the above headline.
With the increase of the world's population since 1918, combined with the hunger and cold weakened state of so many of them, a return of the Spanish Flu would have killed far more than even WWII's enormous total of direct and indirect deaths.
Far worse, morally these deaths would not be due to an accident of nature as in WWI, but rather to a willful decision of the Allied leadership : a holocaust of deaths caused by willful medical negligence.
At the start of the war, the startling success of a variant of the new synthetic sulfa drugs against pneumonia bacteria seemed to promise that any return of the Spanish Flu would kill far far fewer than in 1918.
(Most Spanish flu victims actually died from an explosion of rapidly growing pneumonia bacteria colonies living off all the cellular 'food' suddenly provided when our cascading-out-of-control immune system killed off masses of what it felt were flu virus infected cells.)
But very quickly during WWII, bacteria grew resistant to sulfa drugs and frontline doctors found the situation almost as bad as the days before the sulfa drugs finally provided relief from history's worst bacterial killers.
But the Allied medical establishment, operating in the best university medical centres, were personally remote from the realities of frontline medicine at home or on the battlefield and so underestimated the spread and pace of this growing resistance to sulfa drugs.
They stuck to their guns, insisting that the wartime mass production of penicillin, to which bacteria as yet was not resistant, would only come when it had been synthesized and patented.
Their aim was to use keep the formula of synthetic penicillin a military and commercial secret, to thus totally control its production and distribution, so as to use it as a major weapon of war that was to be launched, in total surprise, on D-Day.
Synthetic penicillin was to be produced only for the lightly wounded Allied combat troops, to get them back to the frontlines far quicker than the Germans could do for their lightly wounded troops by using only the increasingly ineffective sulfa drugs.
But commercially viable synthetic penicillin in WWII never happened.
In fact, it has never yet happened and we will still use wartime's natural Penicillin G cheaply, abundantly and safely made by tiny fungus, as the basis for almost all today's antibiotics, almost eighty years after it was first discovered.
Willfully refusing to mass produce the already readily available natural penicillin, as Dawson wanted, and to give it to all those in the world dying from it, as Dawson and the Geneva Convention demanded, was potentially a Holocaust-sized Allied war crime - particularly if a sulfa-resistant global pandemic had broken out.
Prime movers behind that potentially massive Allied war crime, seeking the future chimera of synthetic rather than using the ready reality of natural penicillin to form the basis of wartime mass production were the three scientists eventually awarded the Swedish Nobel Prize : Alexander Fleming, Howard Florey and Ernst Chain !
There is a certain symmetry in that.
For the immoral choice made by our three matched the equally immoral decision of the Swedes in 1939 not to join in the defence alliance supporting their close next door neighbours the Poles, which was the major reason Hitler felt so confident that Britain and France could provide little direct help to Poland if he did invade.
WWII followed and the Swedes need to share a big, big, big chunk of the moral blame.
We are so very lucky that no highly infectious global pandemic occurred during WWII -- but if sin is as much about intent as it is about action, the Allies hardly need to feel that their penicillin choice was morally vindicated....
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