Just gonna repeat what I said last night: I won’t trust that the vaccine is safe until Fauci has inspected those balls personally.

Some of you will have read the headline to this post and thought, “This isn’t an important enough story for one day of coverage, let alone two.” Au contraire. Nicki Minaj has enough cultural reach that world leaders are now being asked whether she’s right that getting vaccinated might make your man-pouch inflate like a balloon.

The British prime minister and his chief medical officer probably didn’t expect to be discussing the alleged testicular misfortune of the rapper Nicki Minaj’s cousin’s friend during a Downing Street news conference. But that’s exactly what happened.

Top doc Chris Whitty used his public platform to criticize Minaj for implying in a tweet that COVID vaccines could cause impotence, saying: “There are a number of myths that fly around, some of which are just clearly ridiculous and some of which are clearly designed just to scare. That happens to be one of them.”…

After Whitty had spoken, Boris Johnson then became involved, saying: “I am not as familiar with the works of Nicki Minaj as I probably should be. But I am familiar with Nikki Kanani, a superstar GP of Bexley who has appeared many times before you, who will tell you vaccines are wonderful and everybody should get them.”

Imagine being a health official in Trinidad and Tobago, doing your best to manage the pandemic. And suddenly, one day, international media is beating down your door about a claim that someone in your country got the shot and then had his nutsack swell like the Grinch’s heart when he heard the Whos singing on Christmas. This poor guy had to inform the entire planet this morning that there are no reports of unusual nard growth on the island linked to vaccination:

🇹🇹Minister of Health Terrence Deyalsingh says claims made by @NICKIMINAJ are Not True! pic.twitter.com/dcApHfsq1n

— Marie Hull 💉💉 (@MariefHull) September 15, 2021

Urologists have also been eager to knock down Minaj’s misinformation:

I AM A BOARD CERTIFIED UROLOGIST. The vaccine does not cause orchitis (ie swollen balls). Something else caused that. Tons of data that getting COVID does effect semen parameters and might lead to infertility. Vaccines prevent COVID! Misinformation kills.

— Ashley Winter MD || Urologist (@AshleyGWinter) September 13, 2021

More:

Ramasamy and his team conducted a clinical trial that shows the Pfizer and Moderna mRNA COVID-19 vaccines are safe for male reproduction. Results of the study were published in the Journal of the American Medical Association.

Ramasamy said that while vaccines pose no threat to fertility, COVID-19 itself is a different story.

“We have done studies here at the University of Miami showing that the Covid vaccine is safe for men, for fertility, for erectile function, and don’t get swollen testicles,” Ramasamy said. “In fact, the opposite is true. Covid can cause swollen testicles, arthritis, and all kinds of erectile dysfunction and infertility.”

What if the guy in Trinidad had *COVID* and that’s why his stones were swollen? Maybe he only told people he was vaccinated because he didn’t want to be judged. That’d be a Shyamalan-esque twist.

You’ll be pleased to learn that Tucker Carlson corrected the record last night in his own coverage of this story. Not by telling his audience that the vaccines are safe and of course they’re not going to give you elephant balls; he’d never do that. He wanted to clarify that it was Nicki Minaj’s cousin’s friend who had the enlarged jewel-bag, not Minaj’s cousin.

Tucker Carlson wants to "correct the record" about his coverage of Nicki Minaj's swollen balls tweet last night.

"Nicki Minaj’s cousin’s testicles are not swollen, as far as we know, he's fine. It's Nicki Minaj’s cousin’s friend's testicles who are swollen from taking the vax." pic.twitter.com/OOSTp7UlJR

— Justin Baragona (@justinbaragona) September 15, 2021

Good for him. Accuracy is important, except in those cases where you’re cornered by your ideological opponents and have no choice but to lie.

I’ll leave you with a tweet from Minaj herself. Every COVID reporter in the world is trying to find out who this guy is, whether he’ll agree to be interviewed, and, if so, whether they’ll need to enlarge any doorways to accommodate him and his new watermelons.

He’s willing to talk for the right price. I’m his manager. Call me, Jimmy 📱 https://t.co/1ZnnUZPPNZ

— Nicki Minaj (@NICKIMINAJ) September 15, 2021