On the prophetic nature of science fiction

I'm currently working my way through an anthology collection I picked up cheap somewhere called The Mammoth Book of the End of the World. This evening I got to a story called Pallbearer by Robert Reed, which really struck a nerve. The story gradually reveals that a deadly virus emerged in China, in response to which the world rapidly develops and deploys a new vaccine. Canada, Europe, and Japan quickly innoculate the majority of their populations, but the USA falls behind due to the number of poor, isolated communities and resistance by religious groups. 

The big twist is that the vaccine turns out to be slowly lethal, leading to mass death and civilizational collapse. The narrator was a young boy at the time and survived due to his religious mother's refusal to get vaccinated. In the end, it is revealed that the virus and vaccine were deliberately engineered and release to 'weed' the human race to prevent environmental collapse, and a second 'weeding' is being planned as too many survived and are rebuilding...

While I don't believe any of the conspiracy theorists or anti-vaccine arguments, this story was a lot less entertaining than it might have been a year or two ago! 

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