After announcing she had COVID-19 and claiming her cousin’s friend found his testicles swollen following his vaccine shot, Nicki Minaj is firing back at pundits on Twitter.
Nicki’s comments Monday afternoon before the Met Gala left the internet poking holes in her testicle-vaccination claims, including commentary from some well-known personalities. But that didn’t mean the Queen rapper was going to stay silent.
“You have a platform, sister, that is 22 million followers, okay? I have 2 million followers,” Joy Reid said on her MSNBC show The ReidOut. “You have 22 million followers on Twitter. For you to use your platform to encourage our community to not protect themselves and save their lives…my god, sister, you can do better than that. You’ve got that platform. It’s a blessing. It’s a blessing that you got that, that people listen to you. And they listen to you more than they listen to me. For you to use your platform to put people in the position of dying from a disease they don’t have to die from, oh my god, as a fan, as a hip-hop fan, as somebody who’s your fan, I’m so sad that you did that.”
Nicki responded swiftly, pointing out that two white men were sitting to Joy’s left and right on air, saying, “The two white men sittin there nodding their heads cuz this uncle tomiana doing the work chile. How sad.”
“This is what happens when you’re so thirsty to down another black woman (by the request of the white man), that you didn’t bother to read all my tweets,” Minaj shared. “‘My God SISTER do better’ imagine getting ur dumb ass on tv a min after a tweet to spread a false narrative about a black woman.”
The rap superstar then pointed out two of her own tweets from Monday, in which she said it was “the norm” to get the vaccine and not contract the virus, and shared other vaccine recommendations, adding that the MSNBC host didn’t use them in her broadcast.
As Minaj claimed several headlines about her Twitter activity on Monday were misinformed, she reposted a seemingly old tweet from Reid, which questioned vaccinates. She also pointed to a previous controversy, calling Reid a “lying homophobic c**n.”
“I guess I can join in the reindeer games too right? Ppl can go on tv & lie on me, I can report on them, too right,” Nicki wrote with a smiley face. “Doesn’t have to be truths. It can be half truths.”
To close off her responses, Nicki hit back at Meghan McCain, who tweeted that she had “enough of the internet” in response to Nicki’s testicle tweet. Nicki told her to “eat shit.”
Reid wasn’t the only familiar name to discuss Nicki’s tweets on air, as Fox News' Tucker Carlson even said Nicki’s testicle comments and her thoughts—which he read aloud on air—“seem sensible.”
After Nicki’s tweets gained traction and left users with many questions, Twitter noted that the testicle tweet didn’t violate the social media platform’s rules. Still, the company began using a landing page after her Monday comments, featuring useful information about the vaccine and studies showing that it wasn’t proven to link to such male fertility concerns.
“Contrary to myths circulating on social media and to rapper Nicki Minaj’s tweets during the Met Gala, medical experts and public health organizations say there is no evidence that COVID-19 vaccines affect male fertility,” it read. “According to the CDC, professional societies for male reproduction recommend men who want to have babies in the future get a COVID-19 vaccine as “there is no evidence that vaccines, including COVID-19 vaccines, cause male fertility problems.”
