In a bid to express his distaste for California Governor’s decision of signing a bill making vaccinations mandatory for all children attending public or private school, Jim Carrey committed an erroneous act.
Wondering what he did wrong? The “Truman Show” star posted a picture of an autistic child without the consent of his family members and captioned the photo:
“A trillion dollars buys a lot of expert opinions. Will it buy you? TOXIN FREE VACCINES, A REASONABLE REQUEST!”
The bill removed an exemption for religious or personal beliefs, meaning exemptions will only be available to children who have serious health issues and Carrey took to twitter to vent his anger. In proving his point, he ended up offending the boy’s family.
That boy who now turned out to be Alex Echols, and his family were not happy at all to see that his photo was included in Carrey’s anti-vaccine rant. The boy’s mother, Karen Echols, and aunt, Elizabeth Welch, then took to social media to ask Carrey to remove Alex’s photo after they saw it.
@JimCarrey Please remove this photo of my son. You do not have permission to use his image.
— Karen Echols (@karen_echols) July 2, 2015
The sadder part was that the picture of the boy he used did not have any correlation to vaccine. His aunt, Elizabeth Welch tweeted:
“Alex had these conditions before he was ever vaccinated”.
Jim Carrey later apologized to the family of a young autistic child after posting pictures of the boy without their permission during an extended Twitter rant about California’s new vaccine legislation and has since removed the photos.
I’d like to apologize to the Echols family and others for posting a pic of their kids w/o permission.I didn’t mean to cause them distress.
— Jim Carrey (@JimCarrey) July 3, 2015
Source: USA Today