The Story:
It might be dismissed as an ephemeral matter, but it is all-too-typical of the nature of debate and discussion of the pandemic and its vaccines. Pop musician Nicki Minaj set off a storm last week by tweeting that her “cousin in Trinidad won’t get the vaccine cuz his friend got it & became impotent. His testicles became swollen. His friend was weeks away from getting married, now the girl called off the wedding.”
Significance:
Out of the thousands of responses, and responses to those responses, etc., that followed, one of the more astute came from a blockchain engineer, David Schwartz: “I could listen to what doctors and other medical professionals are saying based on data involving millions of people, or I could listen to what Nicki Minaj says her cousin told her about his friend. However can I reconcile these two nearly equally good choices?”.
In Pill Form:
A host at CNN asked Dr. Anthony Fauci, the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, about Minaj’s story and about whether testicular swelling could result from a Covid vaccine.
Fauci said, “The answer to that, Jake, is a resounding no. There’s no evidence that it happens, nor is there any mechanistic reason to imagine that it would happen.”
