The White House on Thursday confirmed that it offered to set up a call between one of its doctors and Nicki Minaj, days after the pop star tweeted about her cousin’s hesitancy to get vaccinated against the coronavirus and sparked a social media controversy.

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       On Monday, Minaj tweeted that her cousin in Trinidad, where the singer and rapper is from, “won’t get the vaccine cuz his friend got it & became impotent. His testicles became swollen.” The rapper also tweeted that she was unvaccinated and had recently come down with covid-19.

       Medical experts have long said that claims about infertility linked to vaccinations are unsubstantiated. In recent days, Anthony S. Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, and Trinidad & Tobago Health Minister Dr. Terrence Deyalsingh both said there is no evidence to back up Minaj’s claim.

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       Minaj, who has nearly 23 million Twitter followers, prompted a new round of questions Wednesday night when she tweeted that the White House had invited her to visit.

       “The White House has invited me & I think it’s a step in the right direction. Yes, I’m going. I’ll be dressed in all pink like Legally Blonde so they know I mean business. I’ll ask questions on behalf of the ppl who have been made fun of for simply being human,” Minaj tweeted, adding, “#BallGate day 3.”

       Asked Thursday about the tweet, White House press secretary Jen Psaki clarified that in a phone call with Minaj’s team, a White House staff member had invited the rapper to speak with a White House physician about any questions she might have about the coronavirus vaccine.

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       “We offered a call with Nicki Minaj and one of our doctors to answer questions she had about the safety and effectiveness of the vaccine,” Psaki told reporters. “This is pretty standard and something we do all the time. It was a very early-stage call at a staff level, staff to staff. … We’re not even at the point of discussing, I should say, at this point, the mechanisms or the formats or anything along those lines. It was simply an offer to have a conversation.”

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       Psaki declined to predict whether such a call will actually take place, saying only, “We’ll see.” Minaj had not publicly replied as of Thursday afternoon.

       Minaj’s tweet highlighted the Biden administration’s ongoing struggles against coronavirus misinformation, particularly on social media. In July, Surgeon General Vivek H. Murthy issued a warning against health misinformation, saying that falsehoods spreading quickly online have subjected large numbers of Americans to avoidable illness and death.

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       Murthy called on social media companies to step up their efforts on the issue, arguing that technology firms “have enabled misinformation to poison our information environment with little accountability to their users.”

       Psaki on Thursday urged individuals with large social media followings to “project accurate information about the effectiveness of the vaccine, the safety of the vaccine and the availability of the vaccine.”

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       She added that the White House understands that at the same time, some of those individuals may have questions about the vaccine.

       “Officials who are working on these issues engage in regular conversations, offer to answer questions, offer to do that privately, sometimes. Sometimes, it’s done publicly. And I would say that if we believed that everybody who had skepticism about the vaccine wasn’t someone we should engage with or talk to, we wouldn’t have made the progress we’ve made,” Psaki said.

       Annabelle Timsit in London contributed to this report.