US President Joe Biden's COVID czar has waded into the row over American rapper Nicki Minaj's claim that COVID-19 jabs make men impotent.
White House Chief Medical Advisor Anthony Fauci became the latest political figure to respond to the Trinidadian-born hip-hop star's now-infamous tweet on Monday.
Minaj brought the virtual house down when she wrote that a friend of her cousin's back in the Caribbean island nation had gotten the vaccine weeks before he was set to be married — with horrific and life-ruining results.
"There’s no evidence that it happens, nor is there any mechanistic reason to imagine that it would happen," Fauci insisted in a TV interview with CNN. "So the answer to your question is no.”
"There's 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 may be innocent on her part," he added.
"I'm not blaming her for anything but she should be thinking twice about propagating information that really has no basis," Fauci chided.
But the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases director has a record of flip-flopping on coronavirus advice, first saying face masks were useless before later advising people to wear three at the same time.
In early August, the COVID czar claimed he did not foresee new lockdown measures in the autumn, but last week he said Biden was being "moderate in his demands" for a 'no jab, no job' rule that all employees of the federal government or firms with more than 100 staff be required to have the vaccine even against their will.
Fauci also privately told colleagues in an email early on during the pandemic that molecular analysis of the novel virus indicated that it had been genetically modified. But this year he testified to Congress to the opposite, insisting that COVID-19 had arisen naturally in wild animals before being transmitted to humans at game meat markets in the Chinese city of Wuhan.
Republican Senator Rand Paul has repeatedly taken Fauci to task on whether a $600,000 grant he approved from the National Institute of Health to the Wuhan Institute of Virology was used for 'gain-of-function' research that could make animal viruses infectious to humans.