Sorry, doctor, no can do. Tens of millions of impressionable morons have been solemnly informed by a hip-hop star that getting vaxxed can lead to scrotal enlargement.

Those balls can’t be ignored now.

In fact, for the sake of science, I think Fauci should inspect those balls himself.

If I were him, I would have retired after this interview. What a note to go out on.

Dr. Anthony Fauci on Nicki Minaj's false claim that Covid-19 vaccines cause reproductive issues: "She should be thinking twice about propagating information that really has no basis… except a one-off anecdote, and that's not what science is all about." pic.twitter.com/YXPZuQMs5s

— The Lead CNN (@TheLeadCNN) September 14, 2021

Prediction: If daily vaccine doses in the U.S. dip over the next week, we’re going to end up in a semi-serious national debate over whether it was caused by a backlash to Biden’s new federal vaccine mandate or paranoia among Nicki Minaj fans that their nuts might detonate if they get the shot.

For the record, Fauci’s right. There’s no evidence that vaccination causes any fertility side effect, although researchers are planning to investigate anecdotal reports from women that their monthly cycle became irregular temporarily after getting jabbed. That sort of irregularity can be caused by many things, including stress, which means it may be another case of correlation being mistaken for causation. They got the vaccine, then they had some unrelated problem affecting their period, and they mistakenly drew a connection.

Just like the mysterious case of Nicki Minaj’s cousin’s friend’s bulging testes.

The question to ask with respect to any claim of vaccine side effects isn’t merely “Did the vaccine cause this problem?” It’s “Does COVID also cause this problem, more so than the vaccine does?” The Johnson & Johnson vaccine does cause blood clots in very rare circumstances, for instance. But COVID causes clotting too, more commonly than the vaccine does. With respect to fertility, the vaccine hasn’t been linked to impotence in men — but COVID has, possibly because the inflammation caused by the virus damages the vascular system which in turn reduces blood flow to the genitals.

Vaccination didn’t affect sperm either: “A study of 45 healthy men who received an mRNA COVID-19 vaccine looked at sperm characteristics, like quantity and movement, before and after vaccination, the CDC stated. Researchers found no significant changes in these sperm characteristics after vaccination.” If you’re a guy, you have nothing to fear downstairs from getting the jab.

Apart from your sack ballooning like Nicki Minaj’s cousin’s friend, I suppose.

The biggest reproductive threat from COVID is to pregnant women:

If infected with the virus, pregnant people are at highly increased risk for severe disease and complications from COVID-19, compared with their same-age counterparts, says Tara Shirazian, an associate professor and a gynecologist at NYU Langone Health.

The immune system effects of pregnancy itself make an infection about five times more likely, says Jane Frederick, a reproductive endocrinology and fertility specialist and medical director of HRC Fertility in California. “You get infected more quickly, and pregnant women can go downhill fast,” she adds.

How risky is COVID to pregnant women? Eight died recently in Mississippi alone. All were unvaccinated. Thankfully, all of their babies survived. But that doesn’t always happen:

Dobbs said the state has seen 73 fetal deaths of unborn babies from moms who have had COVID over the course of the pandemic. The news comes as another pediatric death was announced during the news conference, of Mississippi’s seventh child to die of COVID. It was under a year old.

“We do know that COVID is especially problematic and dangerous in pregnant women, but we also know it can be deadly for the baby in the womb,” he said. “With COVID, we have seen a doubling of rate of fetal demise for the death of the baby in the womb after 20 weeks. It’s been a real tragedy.”

Why do vaccine conspiracy theories so often focus on fertility? Partly, I’d think, it’s because people pay close attention to their sexual function for obvious reasons and are apt to notice changes quickly. If they’ve been vaccinated recently, it’s natural for them to assume that the shot they received must be responsible for the change. But it must also have something to do with the conspiratorial urge to find sinister plots behind the vaccination campaign. For maximum villainy, the shadowy cabal responsible for the shot has to be seeking to control people in an especially sensitive and intimate way — by rendering them infertile, say, or injecting them with some chip that’ll allow them to be tracked at all times. The point of anti-vax propaganda is to scare people away from the shot and “you won’t be able to have children if you get it” is a lot scarier than, say, “it’ll make you bald.” Thanks to Nicki Minaj for casually pushing that idea on Twitter to more people than live in Florida or New York.