Saturday Night Live (2/27/21) opened with a skit of a game show where participants try to get the COVID-19 vaccine. This is not the first satirical game show about diseases. The Firesign Theatre had a comedy routine on their 1968 album Waiting for the Electrician or Someone Like Him called :”Beat the Reaper”. Participants in the game show had to guess what disease they had in order to get the antidote.
Terry Southern‘s 1958 novel Flash and Filigree included a game show called “What’s My Disease?”. My copy is packed up but here are links to descriptions. The show is also mentioned in the film The Loved One (1966) which was co-written by Southern. The one on Southern’s archives states that he wrote a screenplay based on Nathanael West’s A Cool Million. I would love to see a film of that. I think it would be best as a Tim Burton-style animated film.
https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2019/03/18/the-genius-of-terry-southern/
Sad! 