Keep something out of the newspapers and it can remain a secret forever - even when it is not : the case of wartime DDT

Hard to explain why both the Germans and the Japanese of WWII failed to make use of DDT to reduce their truly immense manpower losses due to endemic insect borne diseases : its use alone, could have prolonged the war a year or two more.

After all, knowledge of how to make the stuff was in the public domain, and in the open scientific literature, having been synthesized more than seventy(70) years earlier.

Penicillin Diplomacy DOESN'T come to Franco's Spain

Falangist denied penicillin August '44

Allied post-1943 "Penicillin Diplomacy" was not exactly perfectly aligned with the humanitarian values of Dr Martin Henry Dawson.

He felt his fellow doctors and scientists should buck down and make lots of his "imperfect but good enough" natural penicillin and give it out freely to all who are dying of diseases it could treat.

Instead they were standing around, as at a railway siding outside Auschwitz with jack boots and whip , dividing seriously ill humanity into two lines : you live/ you die.