#Nicki Minaj exposes how anti-vaxxers aren’t always who liberal media says

I never thought I’d have occasion to type these words, but: I like the White House’s Nicki Minaj policy.

Ms. Minaj has 23 million Twitter followers (almost as many as me) and is hence a person of some influence. Her loony rant about her cousin’s friend’s cantaloupe cajones became the biggest story of the week, except for maybe Bolshevik Barbie’s backside broadside against rich people at the Met Costume Gala.

But if it weren’t for all the loony ranters, we’d be a lesser place. We’d be a more boring place. We’d be Canada. As Tocqueville wrote in “Democracy in America” (1840), “It is a vast and bounteous land, but also a curious one, its levers and pullies of influence eagerly manipulated by known chancers, scallywags, and crazy-ass rappers.”

With Nicki Minaj, the White House is all “That’s very unfortunate, perhaps Ms. Minaj should come in for a cup of tea with the President or the Vice President and we could allay her concerns about vaccines in the interests of outreach. Er, even though it was less than a year ago that both Joe Biden and Kamala Harris warned us against trusting any vaccines developed in the administration of Donald Trump.”

With the red states, though, the White House’s message is: “Our patience is wearing thin.”

Got that? Donald Trump was to blame for the (overwhelmingly blue-state) wave of COVID infections last year. This year’s red-state wave is the fault of the people in those states and their governments.

I have news for anyone who thinks that having a Biden-Harris bumper sticker on your Subaru wagon is going to ward off evil coronavirus spirits: The vaccination rate in Florida is about the same as it is in New Hampshire, Virginia, Delaware and Colorado, and higher than it is in Wisconsin or Minnesota.

There is a lot of work to be done to persuade people to get vaccines. Which is why it’s great that the White House is treating Nicki Minaj, who has about as much medical credibility as Doctor Pepper, seriously. It would be great for the country if the White House could host a Rose Garden presser a week from now at which Minaj accepted her first Pfizer shot and urged her fans to do the same, while acknowledging that her cousin’s friend was merely suffering from a hernia, not vaccine-induced scrotal inflation.

Look, I’m a right-winger, and I get that there are a lot of people who are nuttier than squirrel scat on my side of the fence. Defiance of expert advice is a problem. At least three right-wing radio hosts who made fun of vaccines have died of COVID. Moreover, uptake is discouragingly low among white Evangelicals down South.

But, as the New York Times has repeatedly shown by its reporting on the anti-vax resistance, the story is way more complicated than “Fox hicks nix vax.”

Vaccine resistance was, until last year, pretty strongly associated with the left. One survey found that Ph.D. holders — an overwhelmingly left-leaning group — exhibited strong skepticism about vaccines. Sorted by race, the most vaccine-resistant Americans are blacks. I doubt that many of them get their views from conservative talk radio.

So let’s have Beer Summit 2: COVID Boogaloo. The White House should take a meeting with Nicki Minaj, but also with Tucker Carlson. And a lot of other people with large followings who have expressed skepticism about vaccines. At worst, these people will be unconvinced. But wouldn’t it be sweet if some of them could be nudged in the right direction, or even turned into proselytizers for the virtues of the vaccine?

More than 100 million Americans have yet to receive the vaccine, and we need more creative approaches to reach them. Presidents should understand themselves to be president of all Americans, even the disagreeable and crazy ones. How about trying to talk to people instead of threatening them like the vice principal in “The Breakfast Club”?

“Our patience is wearing thin” doesn’t even work in high school detention, much less in a country as unruly and independent-minded as America.