Marvel Zombies 4 #1: A Medical Review
Marvel Zombies 4 #1 “Midnight Sons, part 1″
Fred Van Lente, writer
Kev Walker, penciler
Morbius may be a snappy dresser and a brilliant biochemist, but he is clearly clueless about vaccines.
Generally speaking, there are five types of vaccines in common use:
Live attenuated vaccines
These are the only vaccines that could possibly cause a disease — but only certain vaccines, and only in certain rare instances. As the name suggests, these vaccines use live, but weakened, germs. The measles, mumps, and rubella vaccine (MMR) falls in this category. It might cause a slight fever or body aches, but it will not cause measles, mumps or rubella.
The varicella (chicken pox) vaccine is also in this category. One in 20 of the recipients of this vaccine will develop a mild rash (usually 1 or 2 pox near the injection site), and a few children with a compromised immune system have developed a full chicken pox infection after vaccination, but there have been no reported deaths associated with the vaccine (unlike actual chicken pox, which prior to the use of the vaccine, killed about 100 people per year in the US).
The vaccine with the highest risk is the oral polio vaccine (OPV), which reverts to the wild-type fully infectious polio virus in about one in a million recipients. Luckily, the OPV hasn’t been used in the United States in nearly a decade (and realistically, before the vaccine, many more than one in a million children contracted polio).
Killed virus vaccines
These vaccines used dead germs to induce an immune response. Since the germs are dead, they can’t cause a disease. Killed vaccines include polio (the current injectable vaccine, not the oral one), hepatitis A, and the flu.
Subunit vaccines
In these vaccines, only a small part of the infectious organism is used — generally a surface protein. Since the entire organism is not present, there’s no way this type of vaccine can cause an infectious disease. Hepatitis B and the HPV vaccine (Gardasil) are examples of this kind of vaccine.
Similar is the conjugate vaccine. In these vaccines, part of the outer coat of an infectious bacteria is combined with a larger protein to make it more susceptible to the immune system. Again, since only part of the germ is used in the vaccine, it cannot cause disease.
Finally, there’s the toxoid vaccines, which are used to protect against toxins put out by certain bacteria such as Clostridium tetani (tetanus) and Corynebacterium diphtheriae (diptheria). Since no germ is used in the vaccine, there is no zero chance of developing a “full blown” infection.
So out of all the vaccines we routinely give, only two even have the “slight chance” Morbius mentions of causing the actual disease. But even that is overstating it: the varicella vaccine has only been shown to cause full blown chicken pox in immune compromised individuals, and the oral polio vaccine hasn’t been used in the United States since 2000. (And you’ll notice that both those diseases are viral, while Morbius specifically mentions bacteria [never mind, see comment #8 below]).
I hope you’re a better zombie fighter than immunologist, Morbius.
September 10th, 2009 at 1:18 am
Vaccines are not necessary if you eat a healthy diet and hang a crystal over your bed! ***grabs tinfoil hat*** ;)
September 10th, 2009 at 6:43 am
What about the smallpox vaccine? I knew a guy who claimed to have had a bad reaction to that; he’s got a scar the size of my hand on one shoulder.
September 10th, 2009 at 7:00 am
It’s possible to have a bad reaction to a vaccine without it being the disease protected against.
The smallpox vaccine is a unique case, in that it’s a live virus but not the smallpox virus. It’s a closely related poxvirus that confers cross-immunity. Rarely someone does get a bad rash, of course. I’m not a physician, but I’d imagine it’s also possible for the injection site to get infected-Doctor Scott?
September 10th, 2009 at 7:20 am
The zombie bacteria from MARVEL ZOMBIES does seem to have a mind of its own (some of the more recent comics showed a sort of hive mind among the zombies, directed by the bacteria itself), so perhaps perhaps even the smallest fragment of it /can/ cause full-blown infection.
September 10th, 2009 at 7:35 am
Official Comment
The smallpox vaccination falls under the “live attenuated virus” category, in that it’s a live virus, but since it is the vaccinia virus instead of the smallpox virus, it cannot cause actual smallpox.
It is also an innoculation instead of an injection, so it almost always leaves behind a scar — though generally a small nearly unnoticeable one. It i possible to be sensitive to the innoculation and develop a bigger scar — but it’s not the same thing as developing smallpox.
That being said, I was in charge of the smallpox innoculation program at our hospital for the last year of my Air Force term and secondary skin infections were fairly common as people were afraid of touching the innoculated area at all and didn’t do a good job of keeping it clean.
September 10th, 2009 at 5:00 pm
From just this panel, it looks like Morbius is talking about some kind of bacteria as a separate thing from the “zombie plague”. I’d have to pick up the issue to get the full context, though, and that’s one endemic contagion I’d like to avoid.
On another note, I’ve always wondered — just how are the viruses used in Live Attenuated Vaccines “weakened”? Are they somehow altered to inhibit their reproduction? Are they extremely dilute (homeopathic vaccination!)? Do they sit them down on little tiny couches with little-screen TVs and very small video games and never let them exercise?
September 10th, 2009 at 5:23 pm
This is the person who managed to turn his blood disease (which I don’t think was ever really defined) into a new kind of vampirism. So really, trusting Morbius is just a bad idea to begin with.
September 10th, 2009 at 5:39 pm
Official Comment
Serpent:
On re-re-reading, the “zombie plague” is an anaerobic virus (which makes no sense), that Morbius uses an oxidizing bacteria to destroy. These are the plague and bacteria he is referring to (but why does he need the bacteria in the vaccine?). So it seems that Morbius has made a live attenuated vaccine — which means it potentially could revert and cause the emergence of the disease in a vaccinated person.
He still screws up in the next paragraph — which is the meat of my complaint — stating that ALL vaccines can revert and cause “full blown” diseases.
As for your second question, apparently to attenuate a virus, it is injected into a foreign host in the hope that it will mutate enough to become non-dangerous to humans, but still able to cause an immune response. (Wikipedia on Attenuated Vaccines)
September 11th, 2009 at 4:15 am
Vaccinia (the smallpox vaccine) can cause severe disease not only in people with weak immune systems, but also those with skin problems like eczema. People who are vaccinated are given strict instructions to not mess with the vaccination site blister, throw away your dressings in a plastic bag, and avoid children. One stupid US Army soldier didn’t follow instructions and almost killed his young son who had eczema.
This is why the world is switching to a very much weakened strain called Modified Vaccinia Ankara for smallpox vaccination soon. MVA was attenuated by growing it in chicken embryo cells for several hundred passages (a “passage” is when you harvest some virus and put it into a fresh batch of cells). It has nothing to do with homeopathy *gagging noise*
Personally, I didn’t have any problems with my smallpox vaccination in graduate school. The oral typhoid vaccine which is a live bacterium didn’t give me any trouble either. The one live immunization that sucked was the BCG – TB vaccine, also a live bacterium – booster in 6th grade in Malaysia. The school nurses gave it a few weeks before mid-year holidays, mine took forever to heal and got a secondary infection from swimming in the sea.
September 17th, 2009 at 2:38 pm
This technical discourse is all fine and dandy, but is this anti-Zombie-Virus Vaccine going to be covered in the proposed overhaul of the U.S. medical coverage plan?
Or am I going to have to sneak over the border to get some from Canada?
Hmmm… maybe I’ll have Doctor Voodoo take a look into it.
He combines the best of western medicine AND homeopathy (or necropathy… whichever works).
~P~
PTOR
January 8th, 2010 at 11:12 am
Andreas- a healthy diet would help; I’m assuming zombies aren’t ‘part of this healthy breakfast.’
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