LOS ANGELES - The governments of the United States, Britain and Trinidad have spoken out after a controversial tweet by rapper Nicki Minaj went viral.
The Trinidadian star posted on Monday (Sept 13) on Twitter that she would not be going to the Met Gala because of its vaccine requirement.
The 38-year-old went on to say: "My cousin in Trinidad won't get the vaccine because his friend got it and became impotent. His testicles became swollen."
Two days later, she tweeted again to say she had been invited to the White House.
"The White House has invited me and I think it's a step in the right direction," she wrote. "Yes, I'm going. I'll be dressed in all pink like Legally Blonde so they know I mean business. I'll ask questions on behalf of the people who have been made fun of for simply being human."
However, a White House official told People magazine that the administration reached out to her for public health education over the phone.
"As we have with others, we offered a call with Nicki Minaj and one of our doctors to answer questions she has about the safety and effectiveness of the vaccine," the official said.
Trinidad's health minister Terrence Deyalsingh said in a press conference on Wednesday (Sept 15) that officials in Trinidad "wasted so much time" trying to confirm Minaj's claims about Covid-19 vaccine side effects.
He said: "As we stand now, there is absolutely no reported side effect or adverse event of testicular swelling in Trinidad... and none that we know of anywhere in the world."
Even Britain's Prime Minister Boris Johnson was drawn into commenting on the viral tweet, which went out to Minaj's 22.7 million followers and was retweeted 117,000 times.
When asked about it at a press conference, he said that he would rather get Covid-19 information from Dr Nikki Kanani, NHS England's medical director of primary care, than from Minaj.
This then prompted the outspoken star to tweet out a bizarre voice recording in which she put on a fake British accent and pretended to be an Oxford graduate and school friend of former British PM Margaret Thatcher.
Back in the US, Dr Anthony Fauci, chief medical adviser to the president and director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, was interviewed on news channel CNN on Wednesday: "There is a lot of misinformation, mostly on social media, and the only way we know how to counter mis- and disinformation is to provide a lot of correct information and to essentially debunk these kind of claims which may be innocent on her part."
He added: "I'm not blaming her for anything. But she should be thinking twice about propagating information that really has no basis except for a one-off anecdote, and that is not what science is all about."
