Dr. Anthony Fauci and Nicki Minaj are two names you would never have thought would be in the same sentence, but alas, here we are after the Doctor slammed the rapper’s claims about the Covid-19 vaccine causing swollen testicles.
In a bizarre twist of events, somehow Minaj landed at that after a fan asked why she was absent from the Met Gala. Explaining why she’s currently out of the public eye, Minaj said, “I have an infant with no nannies during COVID. Who mad? Not risking his health to be seen.”
“They want you to get vaccinated for the Met,” she said on her next post, which backs up a report from the New York Times which stated attendees need a negative test, proof of vaccination, and also need to wear a mask unless they are eating.
Things then got weird when Minaj stated that a friend of her cousin’s in Trinidad “became impotent” and “his testicles became swollen”.
“His friend was weeks away from getting married, now the girl called off the wedding,” Minaj told her millions of followers before adding “just pray on it” and “make sure you’re comfortable with [your] decision [to get vaccinated], not bullied”.
These claims have now been refuted by Dr. Fauci, who appeared as a guest on Jake Tapper’s CNN show The Lead. The host asked him if there were any signs people were suffering from reproductive issues after receiving the Pfizer, Moderna or Johnson & Johnson vaccines, and Fauci was unequivocal in his response.
“The answer to that, Jake, is a resounding no,” he stated. “There’s no evidence that it happens nor is there any mechanistic reason to imagine that it would happen.”
Furthermore, the Doc then discussed the fight against misinformation in the age of social media when accounts like Minaj has 22.6 million Twitter followers. “It’s very difficult,” he said. “There’s a lot of misinformation, mostly on social media, and the only way we know to counter mis and disinformation is to provide a lot of correct information and to essentially debunk these kinds of claims, which may be innocent on her part, I’m not blaming her for anything.
“But she should be thinking twice about propagating information that really has no basis except as a one-off anecdote, and that’s not what science is all about.”