You may be thinking of later accusations that the United States military distributed smallpox-infected blankets to American Indians, which I do not believe is well supported: <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;quod.lib.umich.edu&#x2F;p&#x2F;plag&#x2F;5240451.0001.009&#x2F;--did-the-us-army-distribute-smallpox-blankets-to-indians?rgn=main;view=fulltext" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;quod.lib.umich.edu&#x2F;p&#x2F;plag&#x2F;5240451.0001.009&#x2F;--did-the-...</a><p>(Even if one must be cynical, let us be <i>fully</i> cynical, not conveniently partially cynical: Historically speaking there was little compunction about simply killing people. Distributing infected blankets is an awfully roundabout and even dangerous-to-the-distributors way of doing something there was a much simpler way to do. I&#x27;d say &quot;imagine the way we think of bird flu today&quot; but back then the putative blanket infectors would be <i>even more</i> terrified of smallpox than that.)<p>I don&#x27;t see a way accidental-genocide-by-disease could have been avoided. It only takes one sneeze to set off a powderkeg tens of thousands of years in the making. It was unfortunately structurally inevitable. (Inconceivably, beyond words &quot;unfortunate&quot;, but still, inevitable.) It&#x27;s hard to call it deliberate when I would frankly question our ability <i>today</i> to prevent it; very similarly, witness the number of invasive species that have been put into ecosystems even when we have known better and tried to avoid it. It just takes one action at the right place and the right time, and <i>boom</i>, exponential biological explosion.