We didn't see this coming

[Epaphroditus]

https://www.air-worldwide.com/SiteAssets/Publications/AIR-Currents/2013/Attachments/Modeling-a-Modern-Day-Spanish-Flu-Pandemic

[Jeepergeo]

Everyday, somebody, somewhere in the world has forecast or predicted some sort of cataclysmic event, and an overwhelming majority of them flat miss the mark by minutes, hours, weeks, months, quarters, years, decades, or eons, and we never hear about them again. The one who's guess coincides with an event has their moment in the limelight as the foremost expert, only to soon slip into oblivion whilst unable to reproduce the lucky guess.

[M1NM]

I'll stick with the old standby - Nostradamus:

https://www.yearly-horoscope.org/nostradamus-predictions/

[sd_shooter]

[More Artillery]

Not a lucky guess. The Bush administration (W, not Herbert Walker) ran simulations that demonstrated the possibility and to their credit they acted on it:

"...we must be ready to respond at the federal, state and local levels in the event that a pandemic reaches our shores."

So yeah, this sort of thing was a known threat, and not just in academic circles. Looks like one of the few areas that the Bush and Obama administrations actually handed off information to each other was the pandemic "playbook" they developed. So... the AIR link posted above pretty much agrees with what the US government had concluded by about 2005 or so.