Lasting a record-breaking ten seasons (1997 to 2007), the Earth-meets-aliens TV show Stargate SG-1 was immensely popular among sci-fi fans. Over its 214-episode run, SG-1 touched on a lot of topics - one of which would almost certainly not be permitted today.
In the two-episode arc 2010 and 2001, Earth’s SG-1 team encounter the Aschen, a seemingly benevolent, technocratic alien civilization (described by one character as “a planet of accountants"). The Aschen share their advanced medicine and farming technology with their more primitive planetary neighbors, whose inhabitants grow food for the Aschen homeworld.
In 2001, while exploring Volia, one of the primitive, Aschen-allied planets, Dr. Daniel Jackson, SG-1’s expert on alien cultures and languages, is surprised to discover an industrial-era city buried under a farmer’s fields. Reading through a stack of old newspapers, Daniel discovers that Volia had suffered a deadly flu pandemic shortly before first contact with the Aschen, and that the Aschen had provided the Volians - who, at that time, had attained a level of development equivalent to early 20th century Earth - with a miraculous vaccine.
The first few newspapers show people celebrating the vaccine. But the very last issue ever published displays a front-page photo of people rioting, under a headline that Daniel eventually translates as “Alien Vaccine Causes Sterility.”
It turns out that the Aschen, who lack advanced military capabilities, use a slow-acting bioweapon to seize control of other planets. At first, the effect of their vaccine isn’t obvious, but then the birth rate among the target population starts to drop. Within a decade, 91% of the population is sterile.
The plan is genius, because the Aschen never have to fight; all they need to do is wait. Within a few generations, the planet has so few people left that it can’t defend itself. The Aschen seize control of the remaining population, use their advanced technology to terraform the now-empty planet into vast tracts of farmland, and literally bury the truth of what happened.
To really get the full effect, you should watch this short clip from the episode 2001.
But wait, there’s more.
Episode 2010 (which aired before episode 2001) takes place in the future. Here, Earth has allied itself to the Aschen and accepted their vaccine. Ten years later, SG-1’s Dr. Samantha Carter discovers that she is infertile, even though the Aschen doctors have been gaslighting her and telling her that their advanced medical technology says nothing is wrong with her.
When Samantha digs into the data and discovers the truth (that Earth’s fertility rate has dropped by 91% since the introduction of the Aschen vaccine), she finds out that Earth’s government knew about this, and has been concealing the truth. You see, since the Aschen vaccine would ostensibly result in longer lifespans, global leaders had agreed to a depopulation rate of 30% to ensure that the planet would not run out of resources due to overpopulation. Now that the vaccine’s effects were turning out to be much worse than anticipated, they couldn’t admit it without revealing their complicity.
To recap: a flu vaccine turns out to be a slow-acting bioweapon that sterilizes and reduces the population, in order to allow a group of technocrats to seize control of the planet without the need for military force, and with the cooperation of global government elites who are concerned about overpopulation. These technocrats then use Earth’s resources to enrich themselves, while using gaslighting and censorship to conceal the truth from the remaining people.
As the expression goes, “you can’t make this stuff up.”