NFL star Aaron Rodgers claims AIDS was created by the US government

NFL star Aaron Rodgers has shocked fans by claiming that Aids was manufactured by the US government.

Aaron Rodgers said the HIV/Aids pandemic of the 1980s was engineered to said drive sales of vaccinations.

The New York Jets quarterback further claimed that the crisis was a "blueprint" for the COVID-19 pandemic and specifically blamed former chief medical advisor Dr Anthony Fauci for the conspiracy.

"The blueprint, the game plan, was made in the 80s," he said. "Create a pandemic with a virus that's going wild. Fauci was given over $350 million [now about £280 million] to research this, to come up with drugs, new or repurposed, to handle the Aids pandemic. And all they came up with was AZT [ a preventative medication ]."

Rodgers made no effort to back up his claims with sources, instead simply telling people to "do even a smidge of research".

The NFL player went on to say: "I'm not an epidemiologist, I'm not a doctor, I'm not an immunologist. I can read though. I can learn, I can look things up. I can do my own research."

Fauci was one of the leading researchers during the Aids pandemic , becoming a key figure in the search for a cure . He was also an integral part of the COVID-19 response team in the US, having been appointed to the White House Coronavirus Task Force in January 2020.

There is no evidence to suggest he was involved in a government conspiracy to create diseases, and there is no basis for any of Rodgers' claims.

Rodgers continued his conspiratorial tirade by making a number of anti-vaccine claims, saying that Fauci "has taken the Moderna vaccine," and claiming that Pfizer, the organisation involved in creating a COVID-19 vaccine, is "one of the most criminally corrupt ever".

He made the claims as a guest on a podcast earlier this year when they went pretty much unreported, but they surfaced again on social media on Tuesday (16 April).