Nancy Hokkanen wrote this post about two years ago. The crush is on harder than ever, with a quarantine (really more of a house arrest) of healthy children in Rockland County NY. Davey and Goliath was a children's TV show produced by the Lutheran Church. It had a moral lesson to offer each week. I can still hear Goliath saying, "But Davey, God wouldn't like that." God wouldn't like devout Jewish children being barred from services either.

By Nancy Hokkanen

The mainstream media’s hostile, fear-inducing reporting about Minnesota’s measles outbreak is a far cry from the objective news coverage of years past. Today’s online articles read like calculated rewrites of recent U.S. history, which promote monetary gain for industry and social control for government while ignoring consumers’ reports of health damage from product failures.

During the 1940s through 1960s, most mothers stayed home with their sick children. Parents’ and doctors’ levels of concern about a communicable disease were commensurate with its potential effects on health. During U.S. polio outbreaks, people were justifiably afraid of paralysis and having to breathe using an iron lung. However parents handled many routine childhood diseases such as measles by confining the child and monitoring symptoms.

During the 1960s and 1970s, measles and chickenpox outbreaks occurred regularly among schoolchildren – and were not the subject of inflammatory national reporting. Kids with red spots on their faces were used as humorous punch-lines on TV sitcoms such as “The Brady Bunch” and cartoons such as “Davey and Goliath,” a stop-action animation series co-produced by Art Clokey of “Gumby” fame for the Lutheran Church in America.

Each of the 72 “Davey and Goliath” cartoons demonstrated a moral lesson for children on topics such as kindness, honesty, bullying and tolerance. In the 1962 episode “Editor-in-Chief,” young Davey eagerly helps the local newspaper editor by finding news to report. When his housebound friend Jimmy glumly announces from his bedroom window, “I’ve got the measles,” Davey’s response is insensitively self-serving: “Hey, that’s great! That’s news!”

The scene’s comedic implication is clear: Using a child’s case of measles as news is absurd. On TV shows of that era, Davey’s enthusiastic announcement would have cued a laugh track.

But there’s nothing funny about the horrific rhetoric in this week’s reprehensible Boston Herald “hanging offense” op-ed. The unnamed writer brutally crossed a moral line by issuing threats against other human’s lives – bizarrely, ironically, in the name of public health.

Such vile language is especially frightening for communities of color, for whom lynching is an all-too-recent reality. And the lynch-mob mentality has caused even more stress for already-overwhelmed Somali families struggling to raise from one to even five autistic children in a single family. For them, the MMR cure has been worse than the disease.

Look at the religious inequities then and now: In 1962 nobody shamed and blamed Lutherans or Methodists or Catholics for having measles, or inadvertently spreading the virus. Newspapers did not print threats of hanging to people who dared to speak out against life-endangering data fraud committed by scientists at the U.S. Centers for Disease Control.

The autism community has been battered enough by corporate media during April’s Autism Awareness Month. MSM journalists’ continue offensively attempting to normalize an autism rate of 1 in 45 (1 in 32 for Somalis), and dismiss epidemic levels of chronic autoimmune disorders. Articles promoting legislation to end religious exemptions to vaccination patronizingly dismiss countless consumers’ adverse reaction reports.

A certain network of national health writers embraces scientism, defined as the “excessive belief in the power of scientific knowledge and techniques.” To them, religion is viewed as superstition, an irrational belief system from a more ignorant era. But without employing the ethics that religion promotes, science is subject to corruption. As actor/screenwriter Charlie Chaplin once noted, “The progress of science is far ahead of man’s ethical behavior.” Case in point: all the CDC fraudsters who remain uninvestigated by the MSM, their de facto protectors.

Corporate journalists and vaccine policymakers should review some of the Christian Bible’s Ten Commandments, the Hippocratic Oath, and the Precautionary Principle. To whit:

            “Thou shalt not kill.”

            “Thou shalt not bear false witness against thy neighbor.”

            “I will neither give a deadly drug to anybody who asked for it, nor will I make a suggestion to this effect.”

            “First, do no harm.”

Current public health policymakers have lost a sense of nuance in judging diseases’ degree of severity: Like the proverbial man with only a hammer, to them everything looks like a nail. In this case, their lone tool is a hypodermic needle. And where the autism epidemic is concerned, they wear blinders.

The death of a child from vaccine injury and from autism’s risks – drownings, accidents, immune collapse – is equally tragic as the death of a child from disease. This should go without saying, but some inhumane humans need a reminder.

It’s time for journalists and government to get off their bully pulpit and urge their audiences to put down the torches and pitchforks. Stop the hate before it’s too late, when someone who buys into your bias decides to act on your cruel threatening words. Vaccine injury victims of all religions and races have already suffered enough from your deliberate ignorance.

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(Age of Autism contributing editor Nancy Hokkanen was raised in the Lutheran faith, and as a child had measles like most of her U.S. schoolmates.)

Davey and Goliath images copyright © Evangelical Lutheran Church in America. Davey and Goliath® and Davey and Goliath characters are registered trademarks of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America. All Rights Reserved. Used With Permission.

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