Nicki Minaj has met her match in Chris Whitty – let’s settle it with a rap battle

Perhaps the two of them have more in common than they realise, though

Nicki Minaj feels hard done by. “They lied on me,” she says. This comes after the rapper told her Twitter followers on Monday that her cousin in Trinidad is refusing to get the Covid-19 vaccine because his friend had it and then became impotent with swollen testicles. All of which led to him being dumped by his fiancee.

Nicki Minaj then revealed on Tuesday that her cousin had just texted her to say that his friend being impotent with swollen testicles was supposed to be a secret and that it was now broadcast across the world and it was all her fault. So if anybody has a right to feel hard done by, it would seem to be Nicki Minaj’s cousin’s friend.

Of course, the cousin’s friend has not been named but there can’t be too many friends of cousins of Nicki Minaj who have just split from their fiancees on the island of Trinidad and who have suffered significant medical difficulties in the recent past. A problem shared is supposed to be a problem halved but possibly not when your problem has been shared around the entire world and you become known as Trinidad’s Buster Gonad.

In her recent single with 6ix9ine “Trollz”, Minaj took aim at her haters who are always commenting on her social media pages, which seems somewhat hypocritical when, on her own social media page, she herself is commenting on the intimate medical problems of somebody she doesn’t even know while causing her cousin some difficulty with his friend.

Nicki Minaj feels hard done by because she hasn’t actually told anybody not to take the vaccine. She has said she is doing her own research first. This seems admirable but it’s not exactly clear how she is doing this research. Is Minaj doing her research by reading peer-reviewed academic journals on the safety of Covid vaccines? Or is Minaj doing her research by phoning up all of her cousins to see if any of their friends misattribute strange medical phenomena to having had the vaccine?

Minaj was also upset that people had said she didn’t go to Monday’s Met Gala because of their policy of needing guests to have been vaccinated. This, she said, was only one of the reasons she didn’t attend. Given the OTT costumes that were on offer at the Met Ball, it’s a shame Minaj didn’t go. It would have been fun seeing her dressed as a giant syringe with unfeasibly large testicles, carrying a sign saying “Vaccinate the rich”.

Chris Whitty was asked on Tuesday what he thought of Nicki Minaj’s swollen testicle assertion. He said that it was untrue and that people who knowingly peddle untruths should be ashamed. That’s quite a diss from England’s chief medical officer. One wonders if Whitty knows what he is taking on when confronting Minaj. She has already this week called the BBC’s Laura Kuenssberg a “dumbo” and “jackass”, and Piers Morgan a “stupid piece of s***”.

Nicki Minaj often replies to her critics on her next musical release, usually by referencing how much money she is making in comparison to those who have criticised her, how hot everybody finds her in comparison to her critics and how many records she has sold in comparison to them. Whitty could reply that he is a professor, a fellow of the Royal College of Physicians, a fellow of the Academy of Medical Sciences, a Companion of the Order of the Bath, and point out how many mugs he has sold on Amazon with the caption, “Next Slide Please”. If Whitty could say all that to a musical beat while wearing a baseball cap backwards, I think he’s got every chance of storming the Billboard 100. Professor Chris Whitty vs Nicki Minaj is a rap battle to dream of.

But perhaps Whitty and Minaj have more in common than they realise. Minaj has said that people should wear masks and that she herself expects to have the Covid vaccine, if only so she can go out on tour. Perhaps then a collaboration between the two might not be an impossibility. Nick Minaj feat. Professor Chris Whitty could be a cross-Atlantic banger.

Boris Johnson also commented on Minaj, saying he wasn’t as aware of her work as possibly he should be – but Minaj forgave Johnson because she said, “I love him.” Perhaps this is what Minaj should be criticised for most.

If you are a fan of people wearing masks, how could you possibly love somebody who says that you should wear masks in busy places but who then releases a photo of himself in a busy place pointedly not wearing a mask? How could you love somebody who is part of a government who has promised 80 million vaccines to Covax to help poorer countries vaccinate their populations but has so far delivered only 5.1 million of them, a mere 6.38 per cent of the total, and those that have been delivered have been mostly extremely close to their expiry date and thus in danger of not being usable?

Professor Sarah Gilbert, lead creator of the Oxford vaccine, said last Friday that, instead of third jabs for people in the UK, those vaccines should be sent to countries where only a tiny percentage of the populations have so far been vaccinated. She explained that, as the virus spreads it mutates and it is therefore very much in our interests to reduce the worldwide spread of the disease because we don’t know how much more dangerous any Covid mutation might be.

These comments have not troubled the news agenda to the same extent as Nicki Minaj’s #Ballsgate. Of course, Professor Gilbert could have continued that one of these future Covid mutations had the remote possibility of leading to preposterously pendulous and painful plums, and maybe then our government’s position at very near the top of the Covax “League of Shame” would have got the headlines it deserves.