TV preacher Pat Robertson on Thursday advanced a discredited conspiracy theory that AIDS had originated with polio vaccines being tested on monkeys.
"There's a disease called AIDS... Where did it come from?" he asked. "From what I can gather, it came from Africa. 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."
"This is the first time when monkey diseases crossed into the human condition and out of that has come this terrible thing," he added. "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."
Right Wing Watch, which flagged the Robertson clip, pointed out that historian David Oshinsky, a report published in Nature and at least four other research groups had all come to the conclusion years ago that the theory Robertson repeated on Thursday was false.
Watch this video from CBN's The 700 Club broadcast Oct. 10, 2013.
