[conspire] "immunity" (COVID-19, ...) Re: Numbers racket

[Rick Moen]

Quoting Paul Zander (paulz at ieee.org):

>  Some people will always want pets. Others will be farmers.  
> 
> The book and National Geographic series "Guns, Germs, and Steel"
> suggested that because Europeans had lived close to various animals,
> they had developed immunity to various diseases.  When they spread out
> around the world they took germs that native peoples had not been
> exposed to and unintentionally killed off people making it easier to
> colonize.

I was unaware of any television series, but certainly read Dr. Jared
Diamond's Pulitzer Prize-winning book.  (His follow-on book, _Collapse:
How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed_ also richly merits reading,
even though it's a bit depressing.)

What Diamond says about the destruction of many whole Amerindian
societies by European diseases originating in livestock (including
smallpox, measles, and influenza), just prior to major settlement along
the present East Coast of the USA and Canada, is provably true.  There
was a huge die-off, all the way from the Mississippi River valley to the
Atlantic.  Although the domination by colonists from Northern Europe
probably would have happened anyway, the introduction of European
diseases, earlier, primarily by the Spanish and Portuguese, made those
matters easier for the later-coming colonists by drastically weakening
the Amerindian competition.

I don't have references, as such, but I guess one could start here:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Population_history_of_indigenous_peoples_of_the_Americas#Depopulation_from_disease