From Ancient Rome to the Moderna Vax: The Sinister Sounding mNEXSPIKE

Blazing Reader,

As you probably know, the FDA approved Moderna's latest COVID-busting concoction with a package insert admitting that 2.7% of the trial group had at least one serious adverse reaction. Of course, they claim 2.7% is a perfectly acceptable amount of suffering and there's no reason to bother with a placebo trial.

However, more interesting for the wordsmith in me is the debate over the name of the injection. The defendants claim the NEX in mNEXSPIKE is short for "next." While the more skeptical are pointing out that NEX is the Latin word for "death" (and a whole lot more).

"In Latin, the word 'NEX' doesn’t just mean 'death," writes Dr. Nicolas Hulscher, an epidemiologist at the McCullough Foundation. "It refers specifically to violent or unlawful death — murder, execution, or slaughter. Roman legal and military texts used it to describe judicial killings, combat fatalities, and state-ordered executions — as found in the writings of Cicero, Caesar, Virgil, and Suetonius."

Beyond the Latin word play, putting the English word "spike" in the drug's name seems like enough of a gorey deterrent. Spikes, after all, were used by those Latin-speaking Romans to perpetuate violent deaths (e.g. nailing people to crosses).

Considering that surveys are showing as many as 50% of people suspect the COVID shots are harmful, you'd think Moderna's high-priced marketing team would have had a few more brainstorming sessions before running with mNEXSPIKE.

Deliberate or not, I'm glad they picked a name that will deter even more people from rolling up their sleeves in some kind of blind, sacrificial, religious, "til death do us part" devotion to following the so-called science.

John C.A. Manley

PS I learned a bit of Latin when writing All the Humans are Sleeping — as part of the novel takes place in a virtual recreation of Ancient Rome. It even uses the word "Neco!" (Kill him!) during one of those nasty gladiator fights. You can purchase a copy or get a sneak preview at AllTheHumansAreSleeping.com.

John C. A. Manley is the author of Much Ado About Corona, All The Humans Are Sleeping and other works of philosophical fiction that are "so completely engaging that you find yourself alternately laughing, gasping, hanging on for dear life." Get free samples of his stories by becoming a Blazing Pine Cone email subscriber.