Dolly Parton is trending online this week for her $1 million donation towards research in the search for a cure for COVID-19.
The country music icon actually made the donation earlier this year and posted about it on Instagram on April 1 crediting her longtime friend and Vanderbilt researcher Dr. Naji Abumrad for informing her that “they were making some exciting advancements towards research of the coronavirus for a cure.”
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A tweet shared Monday by a planning student at the University of Maryland went viral after it pointed to Dolly’s donation and subsequent credit in the Moderna vaccine preliminary report from the New England Journal of Medicine.
Fact-checking this was worth it just to see @DollyParton in the acknowledgments of a @NEJM article. And I thought I couldn’t love her more. https://t.co/S3njHEFcGT pic.twitter.com/WcrFIrHp67
— Dr. Meade Krosby (@MeadeKrosby) November 17, 2020
“I’m just happy that anything I do, can help somebody else, and when I donated the money to the COVID fund I just wanted it to do good and evidently it is," Dolly said on the Today Show Tuesday. “I just hope we find a cure real soon.”
Parton is known for her philanthropic nature, having set up the Dollywood Foundation which has, in the past, donated money to families affected by fires in the Gatlinburg, Tennessee area.
She’s also at the helm of Dolly Parton’s Imagination Library - “a book gifting program which mails high-quality, free books to more than a million children around the world each month,” the foundation’s website states.