Christian televangelist and former presidential candidate Pat Robertson blamed a supposedly contaminated polio vaccine for the spread of AIDS in Africa, Right Wing Watch reports. He made his remarks on The 700 Club, which is produced by his Christian Broadcasting Network (CBN) and airs on ABC Family.

“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.”

Right Wing Watch cites several sources that refute his theory about the origin of AIDS in humans, which was widely disseminated in The River, a 1999 book by Edward Hooper. In 2001, four independent research groups determined that stored samples from a 1950s trial of a live-virus polio vaccine in Africa did not contain HIV.

Earlier this year, Robertson said on The 700 Club that gay men in San Francisco try to transmit HIV intentionally by cutting people with rings when they shake hands.

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