Dolly Parton donated $ 1 million for COVID-19 vaccine and celebrates progress

By Ree Hines - NBC News

There's hope on the horizon for a COVID-19 vaccine, thanks to countless researchers, epidemiologists, immunologists, and… Dolly Parton?

On Monday, just a week after pharmaceutical company Pfizer announced promising results in its phase three trials for a candidate vaccine, the biotech company Moderna also revealed that the first results of theirs show that it is 94.5% effective in the vaccine. infection prevention.

But what does all this have to do with

singer

?

The queen of country music is also a philanthropist.

In 2016, her Dollywood Foundation donated $ 1,000 per month to families affected by the Tennessee wildfires.

Those payments continued for six months.

In 1995, the composer founded the Dolly Parton Imagination Library, a literacy program that has donated more than 100 million books to children.

And earlier this year, he was behind another generous act: He donated $ 1 million to fight the coronavirus.

“This is a big step,” Fauci says of Moderna's announcement of vaccine advances.

Nov. 17, 202002: 30

Your donations are now paying off.

"That's what I understood this morning," Parton said during a visit to TODAY television show Tuesday, after discovering that his donation played a role in Moderna's success.

, and when I donated the money to the COVID fund, I just wanted it to do good. Obviously, it happened. Hopefully a cure is found very soon."

Parton first announced his donation on Instagram in April.

"My old friend, Dr. Naji Abumrad, who has been involved in research at Vanderbilt for many years, informed me that they were making some exciting strides toward researching a cure for coronavirus," he wrote in a post at the time.

"I will make a donation of $ 1 million to Vanderbilt for that research and to encourage people who can afford it to make donations," he wrote.

The official preliminary report on the Moderna vaccine now credits, among other organizations and donors, the Dolly Parton Research Fund for COVID-19.

Markets soar after Moderna's COVID-19 vaccine advance announcement

Nov. 17, 202000: 27

But the messages from his loyal fans on social media give him a little more credit than this.

They have joked that the singer, songwriter and actress has actually "cured the coronavirus."

One fan wrote:

[This is how we tell the latest news about the COVID-19 pandemic]

Last month, Parton released her first Christmas album in 30 years,

.

On Tuesday, the artist's latest book,

.

On November 22, fans will be able to catch her in the new Netflix movie

.

As she said during her TODAY interview on Tuesday: "I have to be busy to be creative."