Canada

The COVID-19 pandemic was a mass disabling event that made the inadequacies of our system obvious even to those who are not critical of it.

COVID-19 is dangerous to the state because it shatters the idea that disability is inherent or only afflicts the unproductive. It can just happen to you randomly, last forever, and because this thing is an exceptionally infectious airborne disease, it demands a community consciousness that supercedes profit imperatives and progressive growth in order to be addressed effectively. Since we live in a neoliberal shithole that wants you to thank your lucky stars every day you aren't left destitute, COVID is a dangerous reminder to the masses that their value is determined by the profit they produce for the wealthy and that the wealth extracted from them in the form of taxes has infact not been used to facilitate a support network that would protect them should they ever become disabled. UBI came up in parliament almost instantaneously when it became apparent that this was going to disrupt productivity and that was terrifying to neoliberals.

That's why COVID is politicised so heavily, but it's also a vascular disease that is significantly more likely to cause harm than influenza. It is classified at biosafety level 3 (the same as tuberculosis, West Nile, and HIV), which means it is also significantly more expensive for the state to allocate funds to address it specifically. The pandemic arrived in a period where neoliberalization has successfully eroded public medical funding as well as public trust in social welfare policies, so that politicization is easily directed into apathetic dismissal to protect the status quo. Quebec has also infamously gone through a few scandals involving the misallocation of public funds over the past few years, which certainly effects decisions like these.