Karyne Kuzawski writes: Many people in the alternative spirituality community are anti-vaccine. When Neopagan feminist Starhawk got vaccinated, she received a lot of negative feedback from people saying she was going against her values. Why wasn’t she letting/helping her healthy immune system take care of her? I loved her response:

Starhawk wrote: What about herbal medicine and natural methods? Hey, I drink ginger tea whenever I feel fluish, or chomp on turkey tail mushrooms, and that generally works fine for me. I have a good, strong immune system.

But Covid-19 is not the flu. It’s something our immune systems have not yet evolved to deal with.

When Europeans arrived on this continent, the indigenous people of the Americas were amazing herbalists, incredibly skilled healers, extremely knowledgeable about all the medicines of the land, and they ate completely wild, nutrient dense organic food—but they had never developed immunities to European diseases and tens of millions died.

For that matter, the old Witches of Europe were damn good herbalists but that wasn’t much help, either, against the bubonic plague. I’m not arrogant enough to think that I’m in their league, anyway.

Starhawk (born June 17, 1951) is an American feminist and author. She is known as a theorist of feminist Neopaganism and ecofeminism. She is a columnist for Beliefnet.com and for On Faith, the Newsweek/Washington Post online forum on religion. Her book The Spiral Dance was one of the main inspirations behind the Goddess movement. Wikipedia

(Contributed by Bob Brezsny)