RISHARD KHAN
rishard.khan@guardian.co.tt

Pop­u­lar Tri­ni-born rap­per Oni­ka Maraj known as "Nic­ki Mi­naj" cre­at­ed a furore on so­cial me­dia Mon­day night when she tweet­ed an un­sub­stan­ti­at­ed claim about im­po­tence and swollen tes­ti­cles in some­one in Trinidad fol­low­ing COVID-19 vac­ci­na­tion.

Re­spond­ing to the in­ci­dent dur­ing a vir­tu­al press con­fer­ence on Wednes­day, Min­is­ter of Health Ter­rence Deyals­ingh said they were un­able to find any truth to this claim de­spite thor­ough in­ves­ti­ga­tions—an ef­fort he de­scribed as wast­ing "so much time run­ning down this false claim".

Giv­en the coun­try's wor­ry­ing­ly slow vac­cine up­take by the pop­u­la­tion, Min­is­ter Deyals­ingh lament­ed that the rap­per's tweet could fur­ther com­pli­cate mat­ters.

"Sup­pose it was true… we don't want to be ac­cused of just ig­nor­ing it, but we spent a lot of time yes­ter­day try­ing to track it down. So far it has not proven to be true ei­ther in Trinidad, or as Dr Hinds has said, any­where else in the world that this is a known side ef­fect or ad­verse ef­fect of vac­ci­na­tion. But her tweet cer­tain­ly did not help be­cause peo­ple like her are so­cial in­flu­encers and they do car­ry some sway.  So, it cer­tain­ly didn't help and will make our job a lit­tle hard­er, which we don't need right now," the Min­is­ter of Health said.

Cur­rent­ly, the vac­ci­na­tion lev­el among the T&T pop­u­la­tion is un­sat­is­fac­to­ry.  To date, on­ly 39.2 per cent of the pop­u­la­tion have ac­cessed a COVID-19 vac­cine, with 32.1 per cent com­plet­ing their regime. That means the ma­jor­i­ty of the pop­u­la­tion re­mains un­vac­ci­nat­ed.

"We have to reach a cou­ple of hun­dred-thou­sand peo­ple still...to get us out of the woods," Min­is­ter Deyals­ingh not­ed.