WRONG AS USUAL

Pat Robertson Thinks AIDS Is The Result Of A Failed Polio Experiment

Pat Robertson sure is on a roll this week. First it was the rant about how low-carb diets violated God’s laws. Then it was the comparison of transgender people to his castrated horse.  Now the televangelist has returned to the comfort of bizarre conspiracy theories, claiming that AIDS is the result of a polio experiment gone wrong.

“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 claimed.

“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.”

Of course, with just about anything that comes out of Robertson’s mouth after “Hello,” this is completely wrong. The idea that a botch polio experiment that used cells from chimps somehow contained the simian version of HIV has been around for more than a decade. But when scientists examined the vaccine doses in question, they found they came from monkeys, which don’t carry the immunodeficiency virus.

Still, there’s no keeping a bad conspiracy theory down. And this is a trifecta for Pat. He gets to bash the UN and he gets to promote resistance to life-saving polio vaccines, while blaming us for the spread of AIDS. What more could a wingnut ask for?

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