V-Word: The Multi-Billion Dollar Sacred Cow
...and some linguistic sleight of hand.
This story is about words and profits.
It is about an important English word that, I believe, is being currently hijacked in a semi-coordinated fashion to serve extremely ambitious economic goals. So I am going to commit an act of blasphemy against political correctness (and enjoy it).
The word is “vaccine” (hereinafter “v-word” because I’d rather not get booted off social media for pissing on the multi-billion-dollar sacred cow).
I’ll start with describing the most obvious and the simplest hijack of this word.
If you remember, a couple of months ago, in response to complaints about how the aggressively promoted medical product of the day did not fit the legal definition of the v-word—and therefore, the legal immunity enjoyed by the manufacturers of said product could theoretically be contested in case of injury—the Merriam-Webster dictionary went ahead and changed the definition of the v-word to include gene therapy. I found the timing of the change (direc…
