Even in the best run empires, plagues have a way of happening. Generally speaking the poorer the populace, the higher the death toll. Diseases love it when people live next to their own open sewers, makes their job easier I suppose.
While it may be true that individually I don't care about my subjects or their rights, as a population they are very important to me. A despot with no one to order around ain't much of a despot. So I took some proactive steps to keep as many of them alive as possible when the winds of plague came knocking.
My first step when I received advanced notice of this virulence and it became obvious it was going to be a particularly nasty one, was to shut the borders and mercilessly slaughter and burn anything that attempted to cross my borders.
Next, I proactively burned down a bunch of tenements and the poorest-of-the-poor villages with a fair amount of civilian collateral, which is all in the playbook when you're evil. It really makes managing things like this much easier than in nations where people can whine to elected officials and whatnot. My word is law and in this happenstance, that word is FIRE.
In-Hovel shelter laws were enacted and roving bands of magically protected
Now some of you might be thinking, 'wait a minute, you just said "magically protected" thugs, I mean representatives. If they can be protected through sorcerous means, why can't the general populace?'
I'm glad you asked, you simple minded fuck. Do you think magic just grows on trees and is free for the taking? I mean, it's just a simple matter of numbers. It takes an enormous amount of thaumic energy to protect even small numbers of humans from an aggressive and deadly virus, and even when my main evil branch of Dark Clerics have their sacrificial pyres going full bore, twenty-four seven, I can't burn halflings and gnomes fast enough to keep up with protecting a hundred or so, much less 50 million.
So to magically protect every person in my Empire, I'd have to burn literally every other living creature on the planet and while my logistics department assures me that it's "totally doable", it's likely to create "various catastrophic event scenarios for the future of the Empire".
Well, duh. I knew that already but if you were one of the ones who asked why everyone couldn't be protected via wizardry, there's your answer.
My border security plan followed a simple set of rule changes: instead of immigration we've embraced a policy of immolation. Once the word got out about that, we had to incinerate very few refugees thereafter.
Border protection was mainly carried out by on-staff and freelance dragons, some of which were hired at exorbitant post-plague rates, which I could easily afford to outbid other global Dark Lords for. Dragons in particular can't catch diseases from humans, although they may transmit them. I know a barbarian girl who caught an aggressive form of the DracoPox from a dragon one time. She drowned when a postule burst unexpectedly, poor thing...
I would've made her my queen if she could've just stopped banging dragons for five minutes.
So to summarize, plagues can jump species as well as races. If your majority human population has a pestilence ravaging it, deploy your Troll Shock Troops to beat them back into their homes. If Trolls could be killed by disease, it would've happened by now, they're fucking immune to everything but fire.
Don't deploy human aid troops to combat a human plague. Burn 63% of everything and use the Trolls to mop up whatever needs mopping.
Job done. Populace (mainly) protected. Casualties within acceptable levels. Virus contained. Tons of stuff burned. Happy dragons in your employ leave you glowing recommendations for future mercenary Draco-hires. Dark Gods are sated and languid. Unemployment is virtually eliminated.
It's all how you look at it.
I look at it from above.
-Lord Hurderoth
His May Be Word Law
