There are many examples and while politicians ignored it, storytellers have not. In "The Division" game, for example, eco-terrorists spread their pathogen using cash. That made sense. If you are a zealot, disease can do what eugenics and population control efforts did not; get rid of a lot of poor and minority people without controversy, and no one can be blamed because disease is both egalitarian and exculpatory.
Unless it isn't.
In the game, the terrorists created a pathogen that spread using "fomites" - physical transmission - because the political demographic group that overwhelmingly dominates government would have segments blaming capitalism and poor health care and provide casus belli for more control by elites.
It's not new, according to Edna Bonhomme in "A History Of The World In Six Plagues", releasing on March 11th, the date in 2020 when the world stopped screaming xenophobia about concerns over the flu that originated in Wuhan and started getting serious about containment.
Despite claims that epidemiology was some kind of Supreme Court over science, the reality remains that rich people running off to their yachts and mansions in Montana and shuttling in concierge doctors didn't face the same COVID-19 risk. Governor Gavin Newsom sent a message about elitism when he said he and his friends didn't wear masks while dining in Napa's French Laundry restaurant because Napa 'didn't have a lot of COVID.' He believed he was making the serving class wear masks to protect him.
Some of Bonhomme's arguments are uncomfortable for Democrats who have turned on Robert F. Kennedy Jr., like when he declares that black people need a different vaccine schedule, which Senator Angela Alsobrook, a Democrat from Maryland, calls "so dangerous." Yet black scholars have written often that lack of black representation is a negative for them. It isn't less access to health care or other socioeconomic factors but true medical difference that was ignored due to belief that everyone is the same - racism is impacting by medicine by denying race.
The party that seceded from the United States of America to keep owning black people, and created 100 years of Jim Crow laws to keep their former slaves oppressed, now has a black Senator saying there is no difference between races when it comes to health. It is shades of the recurring cholera epidemics of the 19th century, when they said it was due to primitive behavior of those whose ancestors had originated in Africa, not that living conditions were unsanitary.
Black Americans knew they had differing needs beyond melanin. By 1877, Howard University had its first female African-American medical doctor graduate. There were thousands soon after.
Yet in the beginning of the 20th century, those numbers dwindled and the reason was because of scientific claims that there were no differences. No differences mean no reason to recruit the best and brightest of a demographic for medicine for their own people, they could become doctors or lawyers instead.
African "sleeping sickness" is another facet. A white scientist who wanted to help created a de facto laboratory in East Africa. His primary sponsor was the German Empire, the successor of the Second Reich that would collapse after World War I and lead to the Weimar Republic that failed so spectacularly Adolf Hitler got the same percentage of the vote in his last election as Bill Clinton got in 1992 - and created a Third Reich that had a final solution for Jews, Blacks, and those with diseases that other Progressives had legislated against.
I won't recount the entire book, there is a lot of detail, but framing infectious disease as a science issue beyond social justice and calls for "more funding" is an intriguing take.
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