The funny thing is, Deus Ex got it all wrong. In Deus Ex, the government is intentionally keeping the vaccine from people, and the resistance is fighting to get it. In our reality, the government is trying to mandate the vaccine, and there's resistance to that.
I have heard people try and claim that Deus Ex is super deep and prophetic, but I honestly don't see it.
Deus Ex does have a lot of silly to it, but the stuff it got right - accidentally or not - really helps ground it further. Even if the accuracy of said predictions is sitting at "we can forecast the weather accurately, we just don't know the date yet".
Yeah, I am deliberately ignoring the jank or goofiness in Deus Ex's overarching plot, mostly because of the "there's no way it's gonna happen" becoming "the thing that never happens" as it keeps happening over and over again. Like, sure, the Second Government™ (Paige's outfit specifically, in this case) withholds the Gray Death vaccine to keep the populace under pressure, while in real life, the vaccines were mandatory products for a good while now. Regardless of what you think is in Pfizer's/Moderna's/whoever's healing water, there's a sleuth of themes you could trace down in both fiction and reality, namely: corporate lobbying, governmental overregulation, man-made diseases and, of course, absolute power. One uses basically scorched earth (or basically capital-communist) tactics to achieve that, the others basically capitalise on the tragedy.
We don't quite have the bumtown version of New York that's in the game, but NY is doing their damnedest to get there :Eli:
There's more to Deus Ex's "conspiracies" than that in terms of its' story, obviously, but I'm pretty sure you saw Ross Scott's pre-scamdemic video on it already.
EDIT: Oh, and one thing Deus Ex missed is how the alleged resistence will, in fact, be the biggest cocksuckers for the regime, - or the bread and circus adjacent to it, - but I don't think that's what any dystopian work of fiction prior to 2016 thought would happen. I mean, you know how the "oppressed sexual minorities" look, right?
I mean, what kind of iron-plated gall does it take to be offended that somebody you don't like likes you? Like, how fucking entitled can you be? Especially if you're professing to be a member of the supposedly opressed class. When the alt-right grifter who wears eyeliner comes off like less of a cocksucker than you, you have problems... ma'am.
Almost like joining a de-facto cult flattens your few shreds of personality to a fucking cardboard cutout of yourself, huh.
At this point, I'm okay with mass surveillance, but less to protect the children and more to protect us from the manchildren. But alas, the manchildren are instrumental for moving Big Faggotry forward, so... yeah, not happening.
