State Farm Dumped Rob Schneider for Vaccine Views: Now I’m Dumping State Farm

Brian Shilhavy
Health Impact News Editor

According to PR Week, State Farm has decided to drop an ad starring comedian Rob Schneider from its rotation due to his “anti-vaccine views” after a social media outcry.

Well, bravo for the power of social media. Now here is my response.

I am immediately dropping State Farm.

I have used State Farm for my car and home insurance for about 10 years. I just sent an email to my agent, letting her know how disappointed I was to learn that State Farm had caved in to the pharmaceutical vaccine industry, an industry rife with fraud and corruption, simply because one of the actors in their advertisements sees fit to warn parents on the dangers of vaccines on his own time in his private life.

For those of you who are unfamiliar with Rob Schneider and what he speaks out about on the vaccine issue, find out for yourself by viewing this video that he narrated and helped produce:

Is this an example of “pseudoscience” as the pharmaceutical industry supporters are claiming? Or is it a truthful representation of the facts regarding the National Vaccine Injury Compensation Program?

Is pointing out the fact that the U.S. Government pays out millions of dollars in compensation to victims injured and killed by vaccines every year “pseudoscience,” or freedom of speech that the vaccine lobbyists would like to squelch?

The attacks against Rob Schneider are so very typical of the supporters of the pharmaceutical industry. They don’t want to discuss the real issues, such as the fact that one of the CDC senior scientists in vaccine research has recently come forward as a whistleblower, admitting that he lied and withheld data linking vaccines to autism.

That’s the real story that should we should be debating in the public realm, but it is much easier to setup these easy straw man targets to knock down. The U.S. government holds $3.5 BILLION in the Vaccine Injury Compensation Trust Fund, and that fund continues to grow because they refuse to acknowledge that vaccines cause autism, and pay out damages to families who need the funds for medical bills. So you can be sure the U.S. government and the pharmaceutical lobby can afford to spend a little bit of money to create a social media storm to attack Rob Schneider. After all, BILLIONS of dollars are at stake in the lucrative vaccine industry as they ignore the CDC Whistleblower story.

The November 2013 Congressional hearings on autism mentioned at the end of the video above never happened. They were canceled. Congressman Bill Possey reportedly has thousands of documents from CDC Whistleblower Dr. William Thompson, and seems to be one of the few members of the House that is not bought out by Big Pharma. He needs help to reschedule these Congressional hearings, so the Autism Action Network has setup a page where you can tell your own representative in Congress that you want action on this matter here.

I wonder if State Farm is aware that social media is a dangerous barometer of true market concerns? Just as the wealthy pharmaceutical lobby has well-coordinated lobbyists who influence government officials to push their agenda, so too they have an organized networks of “trolls” who can exert influence via social media to promote their agenda. We reported on this tactic here.

So you win State Farm. You removed Rob Schneider from your ads because of the well-funded pro-pharma and pro-vaccine lobby.

But you lost me as a consumer. I wonder which is more important to you?

Because in the end, that is all any of us have left in terms of actions: how do we spend our money? I, for one, will not be spending it at State Farm any longer (unless they do a really quick about face), and I hope others will wake up to the fact that the right to spend our money where we choose is one of the few choices we have left.

#boycottstatefarm

UPDATE 9/26/2014 State Farm has Responded. See: