you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[+] 99 points 6 months ago (10 children)
  • [–] 28 points 6 months ago

    This. Before a shot was ever fired the natives in most "undeveloped" regions were being decimated by pathogens refined in our "civilized" cities. This was long before "smallpox blankets" ever made an appearance.

  • source
  • parent
  • [–] 15 points 6 months ago (4 children)

    Don’t even have to bring anything, early smallpox vaccines were little more than ground up pox sores rubbed into a cut. But it worked a hell of a lot better than no vaccine.

  • source
  • parent
  • hideshow 4 child comments
  • [–] 26 points 6 months ago (3 children)

    Didn't they use Cowpox instead of smallpox? The virus is similar enough to trigger the correct immune response, but significantly less deadly

  • source
  • parent
  • hideshow 3 child comments
  • [–] 23 points 6 months ago (2 children)

    Noticing the connection between cowpox and smallpox helped develop a safer vaccine, but prior to that in China and India they invented variolation (grinding up and applying the scabs to cause a milder infection) centuries before European vaccination experiments: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Variolation

  • source
  • parent
  • hideshow 2 child comments
  • [–] 1 point 6 months ago (3 children)

    If you never let them near the coast, those diseases won't matter to you.

  • source
  • parent
  • hideshow 3 child comments
  • [–] 3 points 6 months ago (2 children)

    So their going to stop all of them from the coast when we can't even do that now. Yah right.

  • source
  • parent
  • hideshow 2 child comments
  • [–] 3 points 6 months ago

    Go back and sink Columbus, Europeans will assume they were correct about the massive ocean to the West being too big and dangerous to sail across and ignore that direction for a while longer. No Conquistadors is a huge win for South and Mesoamerica.

    If you really want to reshape the history of the New World you've gotta go back like 12,000 years and convince people to capture and train animals like the camelops and American horse instead of simply hunting them. European diseases were so devastating in large part because New World peoples did not have a comparable livestock culture (that being a major source of disease).

  • source
  • parent