White House offers Nicki Minaj call with doctor to answer vaccine questions

The White House has offered to connect rapper Nicki Minaj with one of the Biden administration's doctors to answer questions about the safety and efficacy of Covid-19 vaccines, a White House official told CNN.

Posted 1:42 p.m. Sep 16, 2021 — Updated 1:42 p.m. Sep 16, 2021

Jeff Zeleny, Don Lemon

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Kate Sullivan, CNN

CNN — The White House has offered to connect rapper Nicki Minaj with one of the Biden administration's doctors to answer questions about the safety and efficacy of Covid-19 vaccines, a White House official told CNN.

The offer came after Minaj posted false information about the vaccines on Twitter and the rapper had claimed on Wednesday that she had been invited to the White House and that she was going. A source told CNN that Minaj has not been invited to the White House.

In addition to Minaj, the White House has offered to make Biden administration doctors available to others in order to answer questions about vaccines, the official said, as it attempts to combat misinformation.

Minaj on Monday told her 22.7 million followers on Twitter that she was not attending the Met Gala in New York City because of the Covid-19 vaccine requirement, and said if she gets vaccinated it will be "once I feel I've done enough research."

She later suggested in a tweet that the vaccines cause impotence, but there is no link between the Covid-19 vaccines and infertility. She shared an unverified story about a friend of her cousin in Trinidad becoming impotent after getting a Covid-19 shot.

"His testicles became swollen," Minaj claimed in a tweet that has more than 137,000 likes and nearly 24,000 retweets.

When asked about the tweet on Tuesday, Dr. Anthony Fauci, Biden's chief Covid-19 medical adviser, told CNN's Jake Tapper: "There is 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, you know, may be innocent on her part."

"I'm not, you know, blaming her for anything, but she should be thinking twice about propagating information that really has no basis as except a one-off anecdote. And that's not what science is all about," Fauci said.

Despite an abundance of supply of Covid-19 vaccines, the Biden administration is struggling to get the rest of the US population vaccinated, in part because of rampant misinformation. Dangerous falsehoods about Covid-19 vaccines are swirling, particularly on social media platforms like Facebook, and as health experts warn that the highly transmissible Delta variant continues to spread.

US Surgeon General Dr. Vivek Murthy has warned that health misinformation is "a serious threat to public health," and in July blamed misinformation for the slowing pace of vaccinations.

Just over 54% of the total US population is vaccinated, according to the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

The US is now averaging 150,497 new Covid-19 cases each day, according to Johns Hopkins University. More than 99% of the US population lives in a county where people should be wearing a mask indoors, according to the new CDC guidance.

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