As if you needed another reason to love Dolly Parton.
It's been seven months since the 74-year-old country singer announced her $1 million donation to coronavirus research at Vanderbilt University's Medical Center. Now, it's been revealed that her contribution helped fund the study and development of Moderna's COVID-19 vaccine candidate.
On Monday, Nov. 16, the biotechnology company shared that its vaccine candidate was 94.5 percent effective in a preliminary trial. After the news broke, social media users looked back at a July report outlining Moderna's vaccine research and saw that the Dolly Parton COVID-19 Research Fund was listed as one of the supporters.
"Fact-checking this was worth it just to see @DollyParton in the acknowledgments of a @NEJM article," tweeted Dr. Meade Krosby. "And I thought I couldn't love her more."
Jason Kindrachuk, PhD added, "Yup. @DollyParton is a Covid hero."
Parton, who first posted about the donation in an April message on Instagram, discussed the impact of her dollars during the Nov. 17 episode of Today.
"I'm just happy that anything I do can help somebody else," said the nine-time Grammy winner. "When I donated the money to the COVID Fund, I just wanted it to do good and evidently it is. Let's just hope we find a cure real soon."
Moderna isn't the only company to recently experience success with its coronavirus research. Earlier this month, Pfizer's CEO Albert Bourla announced its "vaccine candidate was found to be more than 90 percent effective in preventing COVID-19 in participants without evidence of prior SARS-CoV-2 infection in the first interim efficacy analysis."
(E! and NBC are both part of the NBCUniversal family).