We may soon have the blood of Tom Hanks pulsating through our veins. After recovering from coronavirus, the veteran actor and his wife have donated their blood for vaccine research.
On a recent interview with NPR’s Wait Wait… Don’t Tell Me! podcast, Hanks revealed that the pair donated their blood after returning to the United States. The pair tested positive for the virus in the Gold Coast whilst shooting Baz Luhrmann’s latest project, a film about Elvis Presley.
“A lot of the question is, what now? What do we do now? Is there something we can do? And, in fact, we just found out that we do carry the antibodies,”
The actor revealed that upon returning to the United States, he and Rita participated in a medical study, to see if their antibodies could assist scientists working on a vaccine.
“We have not only been approached, we have said, ‘Do you want our blood? Can we give plasma?’ And, in fact, we will be giving it now to the places that hope to work on what I would like to call the ‘Hank-cine,’” the actor shared.
Honestly, Tom Hanks aiding the cure of coronavirus would be one of the least surprising things to come out of this batshit insane year.
In an interview with Deadline, last week, Baz Luhrmann revealed that he believes that the Hanks’ coronavirus diagnosis ushered in a cultural shift regarding how seriously American’s were taking the pandemic.
“If there was anything good about it, the very best thing that came out of it was when someone like Tom Hanks got it, I noticed that globally and particularly in America — and we live in New York — suddenly everyone went, this is real. He became an advertisement for it,” Luhrmann said.
“I was in my house and we were locked down entirely. A team turned up in hazmat suits and we were tested. We wouldn’t have been immediately infectious — you have to see if you have symptoms — but poor Tom and Rita, they were in the hospital and we were locked down in quarantine.”
