History Headscratchers / TheStand

* Oh boy, where to start... How did Charlie Campion contract CT? He was a gate guard, he sat around in a separate kiosk outside and 150 meters above the actual lab! Was the virus so contagious that it ghosted through hundreds of meters of dirt and concrete to dust some hick patrolling the gate? In the same vein, how did it even get to the whole facility? Bio-weapon labs are independent of the building for this very reason. (.2.) Shifting antigen virus's cannot become airborne, the protein shell necessary to survive being outside a host body for more than a few minutes by its very nature excludes the possibility of a virus being of the shifting antigen variety; a bulky protein shell is basically a 'grab me' sign for T-Cells. (.3.) How is Captain Trips still around to infect shut-in survivors and newborn babies? Is it just floating around in the air? It killed all its possible hosts well into 99.4%, how is it still around? Viral residue? After a month? Has no one gotten around to giving the *maternity ward* a once over with Lysol? 4.) Who would side with Randall Flagg other than those who were strong-armed into it? 'Oh yeah, he's great! A good leader, very charismatic. A slight hiccup though, he may be SATAN!' People are wetting themselves whenever he smiles and the grass dies wherever he walks! Um... [[Main/IncrediblyLamePun Red Flagg?]]

** In-between, everyone was too sick to do much of anything. The cities weren't deserted yet, but when 99% of the population is bedridden, it's not going to look much different to a person on the street.

*** And that's just considering how ''Americans'' would react. Given the overwhelming lethality of the disease, it's entirely plausible that admitting the truth would have led to every other nation cutting the U.S. off completely and then ''nuking it into glass'' in a desperate attempt to contain the infection. The novel was written in the middle of the Cold War and well before nuclear winter was a thing: if it's a choice between having the Soviets and Chinese sterilize the continent and all of humanity smothering on its own mucus, even ''Britain'' and ''France'' would probably have no choice but to go along with the NukeEm option.

*** As a RealLife example, look at COVID-19: it has a ''barely'' 0.2 percent mortality rate and people are acting like it's the return of bubonic plague.

* Captain Trips is 99.4% communicable and 100% fatal. Those who contract the disease die, period. Those who are immune simply don't contract the disease, and no one knows why, as we're shown with the experiments done on Stu. Yet late in the story, we see Fran's child by Jess (who had died of the disease) fighting it off. It's explained as the baby inheriting half an immunity, and so while he's not completely immune, he's able to "shift" his antibodies to match the shifting antigen of the virus. Setting aside the fact that the human immune system does this normally, [[ArtisticLicenseBiology hereditary immunity does not work that way!]] You can't inherit "half" of an immunity. Either you're immune, or you're not. Furthermore, this baby is treated as completely unique, which means that there were, previously, no children with one immune parent and one vulnerable parent? Not even from before the disease hit?

** For that matter, where did all those wolves *come from?* The wild gray wolf population in the lower United States between 1980-1990 (depending on which version of the book you go by) was less than a thousand, all of them in upper Michigan and Minnesota. Did Flagg call in a bunch of wolf minions from Canada?