Joy Reid Accuses Tucker Carlson, Marjorie Taylor Greene of Exploiting Nicki Minaj’s Vaccine Comments: Tried to ‘Put Her On Their Team’
On Tuesday, Joy Reid accused some prominent conservatives of trying to appropriate Nicki Minaj’s skeptical comments about the vaccine on Twitter. The rap artist tweeted that she hasn’t gotten the vaccine yet because she hasn’t “done enough research.”
Minaj also relayed a wild if not dubious story she said she heard from her cousin’s friend in Trinidad who got the vaccine, resulting in swollen testicles and impotency. The friend, who was to be married, is no longer because the woman called off the wedding.
Cool, cool. Sounds legit.
The singer’s tweets prompted a rebuke from Reid on Monday. “For you to use your platform to put people in the position of dying from a disease they don’t have to die from, oh my god.”
Minaj responded by accusing Reid of being “so thirsty to down another black woman (by the request of the white men).”
In turn, Reid responded to Minaj on Tuesday, but saved her ire not for the artist, but conservatives who tried to put Minaj on their team:
What disturbs me are those who care nothing about Black communities and who are actually hostile to our interests. I’m talking White Nationalist-curious Twitter bugs and chatter bugs like Tuckums, and Marjorie [Taylor] Greene, and Candace Owens, who leapt out to try to scoop up Nicki and put her on their team. Using her vaccine misinformation to try to back up their own phony campaigns, pushing their base to reject the vaccines while they’re probably fully vaccinated themselves. These are the same Republicans and Republican talkers who have been working overtime to try to put vaccine refusal on Black people’s shoulders, to try to morph vaccine mandates into some airborne virus version of 1950s segregation as if they would have opposed segregation if they’d been around back then. It’s not only disingenuous, it’s also anti-facts. The data is clear.
Reid also addressed her own vaccine hesitancy last year, citing then-President Donald Trump:
When we had a sociopath president in office, who was manipulating the CDC and the FDA pushing for a quick vaccine by election day so that he could assure his owe reelection, you could count me among the hesitant. Trump nearly broke the once trusted CDC and the FDA to the point you couldn’t be sure that you were hearing from scientists and not just the political hacks when either agency spoke. So yeah, people like me were real hesitant. But luckily, there have been doctors and scientists who could reassure those of us who were willing to be reassured that the vaccines, once they came out, months later, were indeed safe.
Watch above via MSNBC.
