Now that they’ve recovered from the novel coronavirus, Tom Hanks and Rita Wilson have donated their blood to medical researchers attempting to develop a vaccine — or a “Hank-ccine”, as Hanks prefers it.
Via MSN, the Saving Private Ryan actor revealed this news on a recent episode of NPR’s Wait Wait… Don’t Tell Me! He said both he and his wife had been tested, and “we do carry the antibodies.” When asked if he’d been approached by any scientists, Hanks suggested they’d gone one step further.
“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.”
Elsewhere in the interview, Hanks suggested that Wilson had a worse experience with the virus than he did. “She had a much-higher fever and she had some other symptoms. She lost her sense of taste and smell,” he continued. “She got absolutely no joy from food for a better part of three weeks. She was so nauseous, she had to crawl on the floor from the bed to the facilities. It lasted a while.”
As Wilson had previously revealed, her condition also deteriorated after testing chloroquine, which President Trump had been touting as a treatment for COVID-19 (since then, studies have suggested it increases patients’ risk of death). Luckily, Wilson felt well enough to rap Naughty By Nature’s “Hip Hop Hooray” in quarantine. It was such a success that she and the Naughty’s teamed up for an official charity single. As for Hanks, he recently hosted an SNL At Home episode.