Tom Hanks jokes that his donated blood should go toward a coronavirus vaccine called the 'Hank-ccine'
Tom Hanks says the blood that him and wife Rita Wilson donated after recovering from the coronavirus, should go toward a “Hank-ccine.”
During a recent episode of NPR’s “Wait Wait...Don’t Tell Me!” Hanks, 63, explained that him and Wilson are feeling “dandy,” although Wilson, 63, had a rough bout of the illness. “She had a very high temperature,” he said. “And we were isolated so that we would not give it to anyone else.”
The actor continued, “Well, a lot of the question is what now, you know? What do we do now? Is there something we can do? And, in fact, we just found out that we do carry the antibodies.” Antibodies are proteins in the body that some experts say protect patients from reinfection, however on Friday, the World Health Organization stated, “There is currently no evidence that people who have recovered from COVID-19 and have antibodies are protected from a second infection.”
When asked whether Hanks has been approached to harvest his blood, Hanks replied, “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-ccine...”
Wilson first shared that the couple had donated their blood in an April interview with CBS This Morning’s Gayle King. They also hoped to donate plasma to COVID-19 patients.
Hanks and Wilson, who have been married for thirty years, posted about their diagnoses on March 11 from Australia, where Hanks had been filming an Elvis Presley film. “We felt a bit tired, like we had colds, and some body aches,” Hanks wrote on Instagram. “Rita had some chills that came and went. Slight fevers too. To play things right, as is needed in the world right now, we were tested for the Coronavirus, and were found to be positive.”
The couple, who spent two weeks under quarantine in Queensland before returning to Los Angeles in March, chronicled their illnesses with transparency and humor — Hanks made A League of Their Own jokes like, “Remember, despite all the current events, there is no crying in baseball” and Wilson created a 'Quarantunes' music playlist and impressed the music group Naughty By Nature rapping the song “Hip Hop Hooray.”
Wilson also told King that she had taken Chloroquine, the controversial anti-malaria drug that’s been touted as “profound” by President Trump (Anthony Fauci, MD., the director of the National Institutes of Allergy and Infectious Diseases told Fox News, “I think we’ve got to be careful that we don’t make that majestic leap to assume that this is a knockout drug” and encouraged more studies on the topic).
This week, when Hanks received a letter from an 8-year-old boy named Corona De Vries who was reportedly bullied for his last name, the actor mailed him a typewriter adding, “PS: You got a friend in ME!”
For the latest coronavirus news and updates, follow along at https://news.yahoo.com/coronavirus. According to experts, people over 60 and those who are immunocompromised continue to be the most at risk. If you have questions, please reference the CDC’s and WHO’s resource guides.
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