Comedian Rob Schneider is known for being against child vaccination and those views have cost him a job.
The former Saturday Night Live star has just been removed from State Farm’s latest ad campaign.
Earlier this month, a YouTube video popped up, telling State Farm insurance customers to flood the company on social media with complaints about having Schneider as a spokesman. And that’s exactly what many did.
Then, on Monday, PRWeek confirmed that State Farm had officially pulled the commercial, in which Schneider plays one of his SNL characters. (In other commercials, Dana Carvey and Kevin Nealon reprise their Hans and Franz characters for the company.)
"[Schneider’s] ad has unintentionally been used as a platform for discussion unrelated to the products and services we provide," State farm PR director Phil Supple told PRWeek. "With that, we are working to remove the ad from our rotation at this time." He declined to give further detail.
In addition to the ad being pulled, an image of Schneider was dropped from the company’s Facebook page.
Schneider took to Twitter to respond to the controversy, quoting George Washington by writing, “If the Freedom of Speech is taken away then dumb and silent we may be led, like sheep to the slaughter.”
He also thanked supporters and tweeted a link to a March 2013 interview with Vista Mag Live in which he explained his stance against mandatory vaccination.
In the interview, he is quoted as saying that vaccines have been glorified and calls the idea that they can stop all diseases “just a theory.”
“The idea that vaccines don’t injure people is a fallacy,” he says later on. “Two billion dollars have been paid out to people who have been vaccine injured or died in the United States. This is a real thing.”
Here’s the ad you now won’t see on TV:
image courtesy of Dara Kushner/INFphoto.com