Immunity

The story is literally a battle between good and evil. Between God and the devil. I think there are probably bits of genetics thrown in. But What made these specific people immune was, in my opinion, the hand of God. (Keep in mind, I'm an atheist.) I think that was the whole idea. God and Randal Flagg chose their players and set the stage for the latest battle.

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Hi Gary ... First, on a side note, let me say that I've enjoyed reading comments in other threads by you and others regarding King and firearms. I know a little about guns, just enough to be called a novice and a dilettante, and some of King's blunders drive me nuts sometimes. :)

Regarding immunity ... A disclaimer first. Although this is a discussion board for the miniseries, some of what follows is based on things from the book which did not appear in the miniseries, but I don't think anything here contradicts what was seen on TV. Anyway ...

If you recall from the film, Dr. George Richardson says that "When both parents are immune, we'll see the last of Captain Trips".

This suggests a genetic basis for immunity.

Agreed. And in the book, we see more of the evidence to back up the doc's medical opinion. Also, although King doesn't give us a look ahead, the tone of the very last portion of the story seems to suggest that, at least as far as the flu is concerned, the problem is over and it's happily-ever-after time.

This is possibly due to a recessive gene. [...] The four possible outcomes of a match between these two are DD, Dd,dD and dd. Of these four possible combinations, only the last one (dd) will confer immunity

A recessive versus complete dominance relationship. That occurred to me too, but ultimately it doesn't seem to work. To recap some things ... most pre-plague people were vulnerable, caught the flu, and died. Some people were immune and never caught it at all. Children with one immune parent will catch the flu and have a rough time of it, but with proper medical care have a good chance at surviving it. Children with two immune parents are themselves immune and don't catch it at all. (In the book, we don't actually see what happens with Lucy and Larry's twins, but this can be inferred from Stu's and Fran's discussions and actions after they've left Boulder.)

The reason that the idea of complete dominance seems problematic is the half-immunes. If it were a complete dominance relationship, Fran's baby by the non-immune dude would simply have caught the flu and died just like everyone else. Instead, this strikes me as an incomplete dominance relationship, similar to, say, hair texture. The child of a curly haired and a straight haired parent can end up with wavy hair, in between the hair types of the parents. Similarly, children like Fran's first baby carry both the immune and non-immune types of the gene, and end up physically in between full immunity and no immunity.

But on the other hand ...

The way it works is like this [...] The odds are one in four that any individual from these unions will have immunity, or about one half of one per cent of the population, which is what the book says.

I did the math and, allowing for rounding, my numbers agree with yours. So I'm going to take your reasoning and run a bit further with it, because you've already laid out some of the math. This isn't to critique the complete dominance idea specifically but instead to illustrate a larger problem of sorts with King's scenario, a problem which seems to me to apply no matter how the genetics fall out. But let's say for a moment that it is a complete dominance relationship.

Consider Harold Lauder. Immune, so his genes are dd. Both his parents died, which means they were either DD or Dd; but they couldn't be DD because then Harold couldn't have been dd. So, both his parents were Dd. Harold himself got lucky twice. First, he was born into a family where he had a shot at all of being immune. Then he won the genetic lottery, that one in four chance paid off, and he got a "d" from both his parents and lived. And his older sister, Amy, mentioned in the book but not the miniseries, had the same one-in-four chance but lost that lottery and got the three-in-four outcome instead, ended up DD or Dd, and died.

So far so good. If we're just talking about Harold, no problem. But what happens when you get hundreds of those survivors together? Wasn't the total population at the first big Free Zone meeting something like a thousand? Well, each of those people had Dd parents, each had that 1/4 chance, and each won the lottery just like Harold. But every one of those survivors' siblings also had that same 1/4 chance, just like Amy Lauder. Let's say that those 1000 survivors collectively had 1000 brothers and sisters who were alive before the plague hit. There should have been roughly 250 of them who also survived the flu.

And that's just looking at sibling pairs. What about parent/child relationships? I won't get into the math calculations unless anyone asks, but here's the end result: about one in seven immunes should have at least one parent who is also immune. Even allowing that some of those thousand survivors are old enough that their parents had already passed away before the flu happened, there should still be several dozen surviving parents of those thousand survivors.

And yet, not once in the book or the miniseries do we ever hear about siblings, or a parent or child, who both survived the flu. Not once.

This just isn't credible. Flip a coin once and get tails, so what? Flip it twice and get two tails, that's unremarkable. But if you flip it a thousand times and get tails every time, there's something wrong with the coin. And I've used the complete dominance math to illustrate this, but this seems to apply to any other genetic relationship as well; codominance, incomplete dominance, etc. No matter how it works, there should have been a fair number of surviving relatives if the immunity gene existed in the population before the flu hit.

So, it looks like the immunity gene sprang into existence at about the same time as the superflu itself. A sudden mass mutation, perhaps? Whatever it is, that's a hell of a coincidence. Like another poster in this thread, I'll disclose that I'm an atheist, but this is King's story after all ... and if that ain't his Hand of God at work, I dunno what is. (Well, actually there is a more plausible explanation IMO; see the last paragraph below.)

This opens up some interesting possibilities. Think about it. The only half-immunes we've seen are the children of immune females and non-immune males. Suppose the immunity gene is sex-linked in some way? Or suppose that a temporary immunity of sorts is conferred to a non-immune baby by exposure to an immune mother's amniotic fluid while in utero? If we had data from a few generations to look at we could tease out some of these answers, but since the gene itself is brand new we don't have that. Suffice it to say that, with the data we do have, it's quite possible that even at the end of the story, humanity's problems with the superflu are far from over.

That's all assuming that the genetics in The Stand make sense and were well researched. But between you and me, I suspect there's a much simpler answer; King doesn't know any more about genetics than he does about firearms. 

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