Televangelist Pat Robertson on Thursday
claimed that HIV/AIDS was caused by a World Health Organization (WHO)
polio experiment gone awry.
The 700 Club host, who earlier
told viewers that gay
people in San Francisco were purposefully spreading HIV/AIDS with
special rings, returned to the topic to discuss its origins.
“I think the World Health
Organization was doing some experiment in the Congo on a monkey
virus, a monkey injection to fight polio, and it wasn’t an
injection, they put it in sugar cubes and they gave it to these
Africans, a couple hundred thousand in the test,” Robertson said.
“This is the first time when monkey
diseases crossed into the human condition and out of that has come
this terrible thing. It seems to be transmitted so often through
sexual contact and it was rife in the homosexual community but has
then jumped into the heterosexual community,” he added. (The video
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Citing several sources, Right
Wing Watch, a project of People for the American Way, pointed out
that the conspiracy theory has already been widely discredited.
“The charge that humans acquired HIV
from these [polio] trials remains, for most experts, an empty
accusation, made more improbable by recent studies that found no
detectable traces of chimpanzee DNA in frozen stocks of [Hilary]
Koprowski's vaccine. The results, said one group of researchers,
'should finally lay the OPV/AIDS theory to rest,” wrote David
Oshinsky in Polio: An American Story.