Two of the conspiracy theory group QAnon’s largest channels on the social messaging platform Telegram have embraced the theory that vaccines turn kids gay, according to BBC journalist Shayan Sardarizadeh, who shared conversations (in tweets below) taking place among believers.

The QAnon chatter comes days after Ayatollah Abbas Tabrizian, an Iranian regime cleric in the city of Qom, issued a warning over Telegram that the COVID-19 vaccine is turning people gay.

Two of the biggest QAnon channels on Telegram, with 180,000 and 56,000 subscribers respectively, have endorsed the baseless conspiracy theory that vaccinating children increases the probablity of them identifying as homosexual or transgender at a later stage. pic.twitter.com/42O62TFTjm
— Shayan Sardarizadeh (@Shayan86) February 10, 2021

The overlap of the Iranian COVID disinformation world and QAnon one is wild. Read this paper on Iran’s often “Islamic” COVID themed disinfo in this paper with @monaelswah: https://t.co/hmw8R3LmJE https://t.co/OSm0RCoLsr
— mahsa alimardani 🌒 مثلا (@maasalan) February 10, 2021

The Jerusalem Post reported: “Ayatollah Abbas Tabrizian wrote on his Telegram social-media platform: ‘Don’t go near those who have had the COVID vaccine. They have become homosexuals.’ The radical Islamist has nearly 210,000 followers on his Telegram account.”

Said one Iranian dissident to the paper: “Like other clerics in the regime, also Tabrizian relates all the shortages [shortcomings] to sexuality. The clerics in Iran are suffering from lack of knowledge and humanity. Actually, his goal of spreading nonsense is to try to scare people [out] of getting vaccinated, while the leader of the regime and other officials got Pfizer, and they don’t provide it for the people with the excuse that they don’t trust the West.”