Disease metaphors let governments extend suspicion even to citizen bodies.

Evidence

Historically we might recall, as Karen Engle has pointed out, that one further advantage of the sleeper cell as a construct invoking biology is the potential it has to enable us to make the claim that the disease has spread, even to citizen bodies, a logic in operation during the McCarthy period in the United States, when white citizens were considered to have caught the disease of foreignness (communism). — Sherene Razack, Casting Out, 101

Categorization

• XREF: Parallels the medicalization of political dissent discussed in moral-panic and red-scare scholarship; connects to how McCarthyism operationalized foreignness as contagion.