Wind Rises in North America 1625

Chapter 161 Vaccination
September 9, evening, around 2 o'clock.

In the central square of Shixing Fort, hundreds of residents lined up in several long queues in the night, slowly moving forward.

In front of them, there were several wooden tables. Seven or eight medical and epidemic prevention personnel were wearing masks and holding a sharp knife in their hands. The knife was dipped in some sticky substance. They cut a half-inch wound on the arm of each resident who came before them, and then quickly smeared it.

Then, he dipped some alcohol and rubbed it around the wound, asked the person to cover the wound himself, and left the table.

Several huge bonfires were burning, illuminating the entire square and revealing many frightened and confused faces under the flames.

What are these doctors doing?
Just cutting a wound on your arm and applying an unknown liquid can prevent you from getting smallpox?
I vaguely heard the young doctors say that this was a vaccination against cowpox, which could prevent and treat smallpox, and that one would never be infected with this deadly virus.

In the past, in the territory of the Ming Dynasty, there were also old doctors in the city who mentioned how to prevent and treat smallpox. They were nothing more than a few methods such as smallpox clothes, smallpox pus, and dry seedlings, but no one had ever heard of the method of cowpox.

What is cowpox?
Did they take the diseased fluid from the cows that were infected with smallpox and then pass it on to us?
How does this happen?

The smallpox clothing method involves using the underwear of a smallpox patient to infect healthy, non-smallpox-infected children for two or three days in order to achieve the purpose of vaccination.

The smallpox pus method involved inserting cotton wool into the nostrils of the recipient, stimulating the pox outbreak and achieving the goal of vaccination. However, this method required directly puncturing the pox in the child, a practice many patients were reluctant to adopt, and doctors rarely used it.

As for the dry seedling method, it is to take smallpox scabs and grind them into very fine powder, place it at one end of the curved neck root canal, and blow it into the nostrils to achieve the purpose of vaccination to prevent smallpox.

So what is cowpox?
This is pathogenic fluid from livestock. If it gets on humans, will it cause rinderpest?!

"Hey, Fifth Brother, Fifth Brother..." Chen Wangquan saw that Lin Quanwu had been vaccinated with cowpox and was about to walk to the collective dormitory area. He hurriedly called him and said, "How do you feel after getting the cowpox vaccine?"

"What did it feel like?" Lin Quanwu reached out and touched the wound on his arm, his mouth twitching. "...It just hurt for a moment."

"What next?"

"Then?" Lin Quanwu paused, as if savoring something. "...Then I felt nothing."

"Oh..." Chen Wangquan looked him up and down carefully, a look of doubt still on his face. "How come you don't feel anything at all? Also, was that cowpox really taken from a cow?"

"If I had to describe how I felt, I'd say I was a little sleepy. I'd like to go back to bed early. I've been exhausted all day." Lin Quanwu shook his head and let out a long sigh. "How would I know if that cowpox was from a cow? Hey, don't overthink it. Are those commissioners going to harm us? Don't you know how much silver it costs us to take a boat from the Ming Dynasty?... Over a hundred taels! Just think about it, who would easily harm us for that price?"

"Hey, you know what? With our worth, those committee members really won't harm us!" Chen Wangquan was immediately happy when he heard this. "Giving us a cowpox vaccination will probably really prevent and treat smallpox. If we get the disease and die, we'll lose a lot of money right away!"

"Look at what you're saying. Even if we didn't spend so much money to come here by boat, those committee members would still harm us?" Xu Xinghuai, who was standing at the back, muttered, "Don't you think about it? In the past few years, although the daily work was hard, those committee members and the many stewards never failed to provide us with food! From time to time, they even served us some meat, fish, and even greasy bone soup. This kind of good life is unimaginable in the Ming Dynasty!"

"Well, Brother Xu is right." Someone nodded in agreement. "Here, although there's almost no rest year-round, life is much more stable. Every day when I open my eyes, I don't have to worry about whether I'll have food to eat. In winter, I don't have to worry about having warm clothes and bedding. I don't want to live in the precarious life of the Ming Dynasty, where I didn't know where to eat next day!"

"Of course not!" Xu Xinghuai nodded and said, "Here, life is promising. Well, just like my son Shuanzi said, life is full of hope. Hehe, next year we will get a piece of land of our own, and then life will be wonderful!"

The first batch of immigrants will be completing their four-year service period in October next year, and each of them will be granted 40 acres of land, thus becoming free farmers.

At that time, agricultural administrators will allocate plots of land with different conditions based on their recorded labor performance over the past four years.

Those with high performance will naturally be awarded more fertile fields, or even superior irrigated land, as a reward for their four years of hard work. Those with lower performance ratings will inevitably be allocated more virgin land, and may even have some woodland or meadows that require further clearing and reclamation, making the initial stages difficult.

Rewarding diligence and punishing laziness, and encouraging farming, are the basic principles established by Qiming Island in its early stages of development.

Although everyone is placed under a unified management system and temporarily maintains the "big society" model of collective work and collective life, this is definitely not a simple "big pot meal", and it will not allow individual speculators to take shortcuts, be lazy, or even just get by.

Of the more than one thousand immigrants, except for some who were placed in the many factories and mining workshops in Shixing Fort and Guangfeng Fort to engage in industrial production, most of them were divided into more than ten agricultural production brigades and dozens of production groups. According to the production plan of the agricultural administration department, they had to complete the agricultural production tasks assigned at each stage on schedule.

From each production brigade to each production group, and then to each farmer, there are several performance appraisals.

Groups or individuals who fail to complete their tasks without reasonable and recognized reasons will be assessed a lower performance, which will affect their monthly and annual labor rewards.

As for personal future, it will have a direct impact on many aspects such as future land allocation, housing resettlement, and the preferential scope of agricultural loans.

But no matter what, as long as you work hard on Qiming Island, you will get good results.

After all, the words of the committee members and many managers here still count.
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"Is there enough cowpox vaccine for so many people?" Luo Zhenhui asked softly as he watched the residents in the square who had been vaccinated with cowpox disperse one after another.

"Not enough." Dong Xinping shook his head and said, "At most, it can cover the thousand or so residents of Shixing Fort and Guangfeng Fort. Jinchuan Fort and Fenzhou Fort may need to wait a little longer. As for those Indian tribes that depend on us, we may not be able to take care of them for the time being..."

“How many of them…will die?”

"At least 30 to percent," Dong Xinping thought for a moment and whispered, "If it's not effectively controlled, in areas where smallpox is endemic, three to four out of every ten people will contract smallpox, and the mortality rate is still very high. However, considering that Indians have never been exposed to this virus, the situation may be even worse. ... I estimate the mortality rate to be over %."

"What a pity." Luo Zhenhui sighed slightly.

In five years, the time travelers successively conquered more than ten Indian tribes, large and small, and gained a population of more than 600.

At the same time, within a hundred miles around Shixing Fort and Guangfeng Fort, there were more than ten Indian tribes with a population of about 500 that were made vassals by the time travelers through economic and military means.

The smallpox virus broke out in an Indian tribe near Guangfeng Fort. When the decision-making committee received the news and sent medical and epidemic prevention personnel to check, more than 20 people in the tribe were infected with smallpox, and seven or eight of them died.

Although the time travelers dispatched armed militia to promptly blockade the Indian tribe and prohibit anyone from entering or leaving, they must have already spread the smallpox virus, and many Indians were infected.

If it is not controlled, it is conceivable that the Indians on the island will be killed one by one by this deadly virus from the Old World, just like their South American "compatriots".

However, Qiming Island was not strong enough and its medical resources were extremely limited, so it was impossible to stop it.

The large-scale death of Indians due to smallpox infection will inevitably make the human resources collection plan on Qiming Island face serious difficulties.

Now that all these people are dead, where can we find cheap labor?

"In another month, the immigrant fleet will return. By then, we'll be able to recruit at least another thousand people," Dong Xinping said. "That way, we might be able to alleviate our manpower shortage a little."

(End of this chapter)