La Cucaracha by Lalo Alcaraz for March 15, 2015

And them Puritans were supposed to be pacifists… not purifying God’s world of so-called savages.

Well, they weren’t the ones handing out the smallpox-infested blankets. It was the US Government, I believe. The Europeans brought smallpox, the Indians gave them syphillis.

Pilgrims? The infected blankets didn’t involve Pilgrims. In fact it involved the US government. That’s quite a big difference, time-wise. And place. And religious/moral philosophy. And relationship between the European-Americans and the Native Americans. And “don’t purposefully kill off the hand that feeds you”. And knowledge of germ theory. And.. this is when you wonder if your History degree was a waste of time… because I could go on a while

Dragging out that tired old lie again Lalo? If you insist on lying the least you could do is get the right century.

Even I must chip in on this one. This atrocity wasn’t until the 1800s…

In 1918 the death rate from measles was about 14 per 100,000.

As public sanitation and diets improved, the rate started a steady decline reaching about 0.25 in 1963 and is continuing the steady decline with no deaths reported to the CDC this year.

The significance of 1963 is that is when the measles vaccine was introduced.

In 1837, the Mandan tribe of the north plains was wiped out by smallpox. The disease was spread by hospital blankets which were meant to be burned but somehow ended up with the Mandan. Nobody is really sure why.

Yep, as others have pointed out, ’twasn’t the Pilgrims who dunnit. At least not on purpose. But anti-vaxxers are dangerous to us, and Native Americans were targeted with biological warfare in the past.

First, I’d like to see corroboration of your first statement. Second, none of what you state negates the fact that smallpox (and possibly other diseases) was knowingly used as biological warfare against groups of Native Americans.

My understanding of the matter is that government troops, forcing the Choctaw and Cherokee on to the Trail of Tears, at the beginning of winter, supplied them with blankets that had been used at a hospital during a smallpox outbreak. I don’t know if they knew to do it on purpose, or were just following the current custom of not bothering to wash them. The result was the same, the death of thousands who must have been undesirables in the first place.