Nicki Minaj turned a lot of heads [September 13] when she told her 22 million followers on Twitter that she refused to take the COVID vaccine to attend the Met Gala, and that she planned to do more “research” before she got the shot.
She added, “My 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.”
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[R]umors like the one Minaj heard, particularly around men’s sexual health, have made up a common thread of COVID vaccine conspiracies that really do affect vaccine decision-making. And they obscure an actually alarming fact: COVID-19 itself, not the vaccine, can “linger” in the penis and have serious effects on men’s sexual health.
“In fact, one study showed that sperm count went up temporarily after the vaccine. It did not go down. And so at the very least, you can say that the COVID vaccine does not harm fertility in men, and it actually, in fact, boosted the sperm counts a little bit after the vaccine.” [says urologist Aaron Spitz].
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The stress component of COVID is a lot more likely to be the cause of erectile dysfunction than coronavirus itself.