Redundant “necessarily”?

I just heard this on BBC Radio 4: “We could not necessarily have predicted the pandemic”. Am I right in thinking that “necessarily” is meaningless in this context?

Solution 1:

No, in this context, necessarily is a hedging term; it isn't meaningless or redundant.

If you remove the term you get this:

• We could not [ ] have predicted the pandemic

This states that prediction was impossible.

Substantiating this requires showing that not only was it the case that no one predicted it, but also that no one was able to predict it.

You could refute this modified statement by postulating a set of research labs that had been battling with similar strains in years past. Clearly, prediction was not impossible. You could also point to actual predictions such as the following, which was quoted by DH Web Desk, citing Brown's book "End of Days":

In around 2020 a severe pneumonia-like illness will spread throughout the globe, attacking the lungs and the bronchial tubes and resisting all known treatments.

With necessarily in your quote, the author is not stating that prediction was impossible. The claim is instead that the certainty of such a prediction was impossible. To use the phrasing suggested by Lexico, the claim is that prediction was not inevitable.

Substantiating this (original) version requires just one person who didn't predict the pandemic. Conversely, to refute it, you would need to show that every person would have predicted the pandemic.

The original version (with 'necessarily') has a burden of proof that is so light as to be trivial, whereas deleting 'necessarily' makes the burden of proof so onerous as to be (almost?) impossible.