Book Review - Pandexicon

Pandexicon - by Wayne Grady

Pan.dex.i.con - How the Language of the Pandemic Defined Our New Cultural Reality

A compendium of terms that entered our consciousness and our language during the COVID pandemic.

One of the better books I've read recently.  Discusses many terms that we became familiar with since this started in late 2019.

Before COVID, very few of us know what a PCR test was or why it was useful.  Few of us thought much about face masks, handwashing, social distancing, Reproduction Number, social bubble, flattening the curve or above-the-keyboard dressing.

Before COVID, most of us hadn't heard of mRNA, hydroxychloroquine, Ivermectin, Remdesivir or monoclonal antibodies.

Politics quite quickly inserted itself into the discussion about how serious the virus was, what treatments might work, whether vaccines were safe or not and what constituted acceptable public health policy.  Five years later, almost ALL of those issues still reverberate literally everywhere, not just on anti-social media.

Face masks and vaccines remain a very visible target (ignoring for the moment the nomination of RFK Jr to the Health portfolio in Trump's Cabinet).  It's almost impossible to understand why something so innocuous as a face mask and so medically valuable as a vaccine would become such social flashpoints, but here we are, five years later.  They STILL are.

A study published in Nature found that, on average, fluid droplets from a contagious person contained 7 million viruses per millilitre and that a person gave off 2600 of those droplets per minute when talking, many more when shouting, as at a Trump rally.  Masks reduced those numbers.  And yet, a Dollar Store employee was shot and killed when he insisted that a customer wear a mask.

"All the reasons for NOT wearing a mask are flawed: no one is invincible, we can never know whether someone near us is infectious, not all government mandates threaten our human rights, and many Trump supporters contracted COVI-19 and died."

Among the many vaccines under development once the SARS-CoV-2 virus was sequenced, were the mRNA vaccines, specifically the vaccines developed by Pfizer and Moderna.  They had among the best success and the fewest side effects.  Billions of those vaccines have been given globally in the past 4 years.  The vaccines clearly worked.  ANY search for deaths related to COVID show clearly that those unvaccinated were many times more likely to die than those who were vaccinated.

Despite this kind of evidence, the vaccines were declared to be toxic, experimental, responsible for "sudden deaths", somehow connected to "mandates"..... anyone who lived through the past 4 years will remember the "discussion".

It's worth reminding people that mRNA is a molecule that is found in most cells of your body already, where it's involved in protein synthesis.  The vaccines simply mimic that process to have your cells make part of the COVID spike protein so your body can start preparing for that time when you're exposed to the real thing.

Government restrictions, lockdowns and mandates simply drove some people over the edge.  The freedom absolutists were outraged that anyone dare tell them what to do.  I'm still seeing this outrage.  Public health officials were vilified.

In late 2024, Avian Flu (H5N1) started showing up in the news.  Judging from the comments, it would seem that we learned nothing.  The H5N1 virus is literally only a few mutations away from being able to move from human to human.  Could it happen?  Yes.  Will it happen?  Probably.  Sometime.  Stay tuned.