Have you ever had one of those days when you woke up, took one look at the internet and spent the rest of the day searching for a time-traveling device to rewind the day and unsee the stupidity you saw?

It was one of those days for me as I went online in the morning to get the news and came across something about vaccines. As you know, the ongoing debate about the COVID-19 vaccine has both sides baring their fangs, with hatemongers and fearmongers displaying behavior you wouldn’t accept from a 5-year-old. However, one politician has taken the debate to a new level.

Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp commented recently that he’s fine with people who want the vaccine to get the vaccine, but the action taken by President Joe Biden to require companies with over 100 employees to have all of the employees vaccinated was an overreach. I was able to see his logic at this point, but then he said something that made me wonder if his parents were brother and sister.

“We should focus on being civil and educating people about the vaccine and not trying to bully them into taking it and work at it that way,” Kemp said when he appeared on a rightwing podcast. “I mean that’s basically how the AIDS vaccine worked, you know, people wouldn’t take it early on because it was mandated, they started educating people and now it’s doing a lot of good out there.”

Hopefully you’ve caught the error, but just in case it escaped you, let me clarify — there is no AIDS vaccine. There’s no vaccine for HIV, either, the virus where AIDS is the end stage. Therefore, how could there be a resistance to being required to take something that doesn’t exist, much less an education campaign?

The podcast was not the first time Kemp opened his mouth and inserted his foot about the mythical AIDS vaccine. During a press conference in August regarding whether or not Georgia was going to have a mask mandate, the governor said: “Well, we are not going to have a statewide mask mandate. Dr. Tumi and I believe that they do not work. They did not work with the AIDS vaccine and they’re not going to work with the corona vaccine.”

Ooooo. He said it twice. If he says it one more time, that makes it true, right? Quick, somebody get him talking about unicorns and leprechauns and see if you can book a cameo appearance from the tooth fairy.

In our election system, we only have minimum requirements for someone to be elected to office. They have to reside in the area they want to be elected and they have to be a certain age, but that’s about it. There’s no requirement that elected officials have to possess a certain intelligence—note that I said intelligence and not education level, as there are plenty of well-educated people who did not go to college.

I digress, though, and my point is that if you’re going to be the governor of a state, or a leader in any form of government, you ought to know some things. At the bare minimum, you should know if there are actually vaccines for major diseases, and if you don’t know for sure, maybe you shouldn’t put your ignorance on public display, especially when it results in Newsweek doing a fact check on your bogus claims.

It’s not that there haven’t been efforts to develop an HIV vaccine. Research has been going on for decades to try and prevent HIV, and while there are medications for people already infected with HIV, there’s no vaccine that will keep someone from getting it. Since it’s not an illness transmitted like the cold or flu, and since it didn’t trigger a global pandemic, there’s not the urgency there was for when the coronavirus started spreading like wildfire.

Unfortunately, Kemp’s ignorance is probably going to give the pro-vaccine faction more ammo to claim that people who aren’t getting the vaccine are a danger to the public. In his effort to denounce to crumble the foundation of the president’s vaccine mandate, he might have only solidified it all the more. If you’re going to engage in a battle of wits, make sure you’re packing.