Peter Doherty, who jointly won the Nobel prize in 1996 for his work on how the immune system combats virus-infected cells, said the worst-case scenario was a new virus with a high mortality rate that was also highly infectious.
The Australian said the world experienced such a pandemic in 1918, when an influenza variant killed an estimated 50 million people, more than twice the number who died in World War I.
Doherty said it was possible such an outbreak could occur again but it was unlikely to have such devastating consequences.
“A lot of the (1918) deaths were undoubtedly due to secondary bacterial infection and, of course, we have antibiotics to treat secondary bacterial infection now,” he said at a lecture at Otago University’s Wellington campus.
“In the pandemic world we all look to these shock-horror scenarios — it makes good television, there’s a lot of books about these terrible infections that are going to kill us all off.