Actor Rob Schneider was bluntly fact-checked after making the bizarre claim that children's hospitals did not exist when he was a child himself, suggesting that kids "weren't sick" back then.
That claim is par for the course from Schneider, a prominent anti-vaxxer who once campaigned against a bill in California requiring parents to get a doctor's signature if they choose not to vaccinate their children and was dropped from a State Farm ad campaign after claiming, among other things, that vaccines are "against the Nuremberg laws."
He published the following odd post on X:
"FYI… There were NO Children’s Hospitals when I was a kid. Because kids weren’t sick."
You can see his post below.
Schneider couldn't be more wrong and a Community Note beneath his post points out his "claim is false."
The first children’s hospital in the United States opened in Philadelphia in 1855 and by 1895, there were 26 such hospitals nationwide, according to an academic paper titled “A History of Academic Medical Centers and Children's Hospital Designations in the United States.”
While the Hôpital des Enfants Malades in Paris began treating sick children in 1815, the paper notes that in the U.S., “the designation of the first children’s hospital is variously attributed to either the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia in 1855 or the New York Nursery and Child’s Hospital (later merging with Babies Hospital) in 1854.”
Notably, these early institutions were “predominantly charitable” and founded by “socially conscious citizens” alongside physicians to care for poor orphans.
Their popularity quickly spread. “By 1895 there were 26 freestanding children’s hospitals in the United States,” the paper said, and “by 1900, inpatient pediatric facilities were common in most urban hospitals.”
The paper added that by the 1930s, academic centers had begun developing into “roughly the shape and scope of modern institutions today,” often using “the concept of a children’s hospital within the outer walls of a larger hospital.”
Schneider was born in 1963 so... you do the math.
He was swiftly called out.
Schneider has gone on record before to say he is willing to "lose it all" for his MAGA beliefs and once said he's long past caring about his career and instead cares about "my children and the country they're going to live in."
Yeah, we can see that.
@followingmybody/X