If you want to save the indigenous peoples of the Americas, you should bring them vaccines.

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.

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

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

Mostly I hate the internet but then you have people who know interesting things and I’m all “fuck yea, internet!”