A YouTuber is going viral for a rap about the COVID-19 vaccine. The rap includes such as lines as “Vaccinate me in my thong/Vaccination right or wrong.” It’s clearly satire, and plenty of people get the joke. But Alex Stein has much of the internet fooled.
Stein told the Daily Dot, “The movie Idiocracy is a documentary.” And in this case Stein is playing the star.
Alex Stein has played a reality television villain, spent a decade exposing infidels on Cheaters, and had various bit parts in film and television. Before this, he was probably best known for delivering such lines as, “I’m an idiot when it comes to smarts,” on The Glass House. The performance earned him this description from Gawker: “He’s a garbage person to match a garbage show insofar that he is compulsively watchable.”
More recently, Stein’s turned to YouTube. Stein’s channel, Conspiracy Corner, features videos about a bug-based diet, child gender reassignment surgery, “the occultic rituals of 9/11,” and more. One of Stein’s schticks involves delivering satirical public comments at government meetings.
On Wednesday, one of Stein’s public comments hit viral gold. In it, Stein raps a cappella about vaccines in a parody of nurses on TikTok. As of this writing, a clip of the rap has nearly a million views on Twitter.
In the video, Stein, clad in blue scrubs, begins, “Will the real Dr. Fauci please stand up.”
Over the next two minutes, Stein dances wildly and raps about vaccinating moms, dads, babies (“even with rabies”). “Vaccinate your body/Vaccinate me at the party/Vaccinate freak/Vaccination freak-a-leak.”
At one point, Stein squirts hand sanitizer on his head and rubs it in then uses a wet wipe to clean the microphone and his forehead.
Speaking via phone on Wednesday, Stein said, “I went up there and played the buffoon.”
“I was really trying to be cringe and trying to be stupid…,” he added. “I didn’t know it would go super-viral that fast.”
Mission accomplished. “If cringing were fatal, I would be six-feet under. OMG,” one said.
“I nearly spit out my coffee from laughing,” tweeted @cassandrajar.
Some conservatives fell for the buffoonery.
Amy Tarkanian, former chair of the Nevada Republican Party, tweeted of the rap, “The TikTok nurses have taken to doing routines at City Council Meetings. Here’s a nurse in Texas giving a performance that is one-of-a-kind.”
“I wonder who he voted for…”
Conservative commentator Ian Miles Cheong tweeted, “Everything is wrong with the world.”
Stein loves that people are taking it seriously.
“That’s my favorite part,” Stein said, chuckling. “The true satire is you don’t know if it’s real or fake.”
Stein (@alexstein99 on Twitter) has retweeted many of the tweets taking his rap seriously.
Stein told the Daily Dot that he (or she—Stein claims to use both pronouns, but this is probably another bit) is a performance artist. Stein admires satirists like Andy Kaufman and Sacha Baron Cohen, whose comedy blurs the line between reality and absurdity. Stein dreams of making a narrative-based trolling video.
People online are rushing to put Stein into a political box, but his views don’t fit neatly on one side or the other. “The right is just as crazy as the left,” he said. He says people should be free to make their own medical choices, but also that the United States should socialize medicine. “Why does insulin cost $200 in Texas and $2 in Mexico?” he wondered.
He says he absolutely is a conspiracy theorist, as many have claimed. He told the Daily Dot he believes that the world is run by multinational corporations. If it wasn’t, he says, the United States would give the vaccine formula to the rest of the world rather than letting pharmaceutical companies profit off it.
“They’re turning America into a globalized corporation,” he said.
He used to feel differently but says former President Donald Trump is a “scam artist.” “I don’t like Donald Trump at all,” he said.
Though some of what Stein does is a sort of live-action trolling, and some may take offense to such videos as one where he wears a The Handmaid’s Tale costume and claims to be transgender during public comment, he insists he isn’t trying to be hurtful.
But Stein isn’t in denial about the pandemic. “This virus is real, people are dying,” he said. He knows firsthand how deadly COVID can be. His mother died of the virus in October. She was 60.
He recalled seeing a nurse do a TikTok while he was visiting his mom in the intensive care unit.
“It’s a little insensitive people are dancing around the floor in the hospital while bodies are being wheeled out.”
Perhaps with an echo of this in his mind, Stein donned blue scrubs, wrote an absurd rap about vaccines, and went up to the mic at the Dallas City Council. Next thing he knew, hundreds of thousands of people were watching him rap, “I want to vaccinate your mom/I want to stick it deep in your arm … Dr. Fauci give me that ouchie/I want it in my body.”
The rap didn’t go quite as planned. For one, he didn’t expect it to go viral. There was also supposed to be music, but his phone wouldn’t work.
He’s already planning an encore.
“Next time I’m going in there with backup dancers and a huge boombox,” Stein said. “…It will be way better.”
