Board Thread:Timeline Discussions/@comment-24473740-20140515123108/@comment-32656-20140519121936

Middle Ages are not my area of expertise. The vast majority of my knowledge of it has been accrued over the years through many sources. Got nothing to give you for it.

University library would be your best bet. Though, fair warning: Don't bother reading it if it isn't more recent. The biased view that the Middle/Dark Ages were a backwater has only been more rectified in recent decades.

The key with vaccinations is that they give the the immunity by injecting you with a weak or dead version of the virus, which will be enough to convince your body to generate the needed antibodies to render you immune to a full-strength virus. That means they are already in your system, just like if you had survived the disease itself.

For Native Americans, they really didn't have the ability to make these antibodies in response to European diseases. That's why the surviving numbers were so small. Smallpox, for instance, would have killed a low percentage of Europeans in an outbreak. Not true in the Americas, at least at first.

Now, take a vaccine, which even in Europeans could introduce a full-fledged version of the illness, and give it to a Native American. May as well just sneeze on them, for all the good it would do.

Yellow Fever spreads differently, varies more, and operates differently - completely different kind of virus than things like the flu or smallpox. With that one, it's just like a worse version of the flu. Most deaths are more due to side-effects like dehydration than anything. In Africans, it is basically the flu.

Vaccinations for Yellow Fever work in basically everyone - natives included. And the disease itself didn't commonly kill Europeans - that it never quite left them, constantly re-emerging, however, did. That happens often enough, and it will kill you. But, unlike other diseases, it gives you a lifetime immunity upon survival, provided it actually goes away. The vaccines for it last for decades, and the same basic formula has been used forever.

Other viruses, reoccurring to varying degrees.

In short, Yellow Fever effected Europeans sort of like Native Americans were with European diseases - however, they leave, it goes away, and it very much depends on the kind of year. Not the case with the ones going after the natives.

Historical record is somewhat debatable as to how effective vaccinating the natives in that early period (1780s-1830s) actually was. But you are correct that the death rate from that one was about the same as the average person. More than two centuries of being exposed to it, mind. By that point, being exposed to cowpox would have been easy. The few natives left in the eastern parts of the continent had long gotten the same antibodies by that point.

In your timeline, the death rate won't be as bad as otl, true. But it's still going to be in the 80s, I imagine.

Not the best source in the world, but not the worse. Note, however, how fast those roads vanished upon use with horses and wheels.