Games

In disco Elysium you live in a nation some time after a failed socialist revolution. Said revolution was sparked off, in part, due to an infectious Prion virus-disease-thing. I never really understood it, neither in game nor metatextually.
Was there actually a virus? Why did it make people socialist?
And metatextually: why make it part of the story? DE has a lot of esoteric stuff going on - the insulidian phasmid, the actual presence of divinity and weird holes in the world. But that stuff usually, to me at least, serves some sort of clear parallel to the real world and a way to critique it - Wonders and loss of nature, climate change, spirituality getting coopted by the state, so on and so forth. Or not exactly clear purposes, but it doesn't strike me as something that's coming completely out of the blue.
The prion disease kind of is. I can see how a plague could lead to social unrest, the game however makes an effort to make it clear it was the disease itself. And also, why make it prion if it was just regular old "plague makes people angry"? Even if that's part of the explanation, there must be more to it.

So whats your take?