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Dolly Parton’s $1 million gift helped fund Moderna COVID vaccine research at Vanderbilt
The late Dolly Parton donated $1 million to Vanderbilt University Medical Center in 2020 to support coronavirus research, a contribution that helped fund the development of the Moderna COVID-19 vaccine. The gift was part of a lifetime of philanthropy that included literacy programs and disaster relief.
Dolly Parton’s philanthropy reached far beyond her music career, and one of her most consequential gifts came in the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic. In April 2020, shortly after much of the United States entered lockdown, Parton announced a $1 million donation to Vanderbilt University Medical Center in her home state of Tennessee to support coronavirus research.
“My longtime friend Dr. Naji Abumrad, who’s been involved in research at Vanderbilt for many years, informed me that they were making some exciting advancements towards research of the coronavirus for a cure,” Parton wrote on social media at the time. “I am making a donation of $1 million to Vanderbilt towards that research and to encourage people that can afford it to make donations.” She added, “Keep the faith.”
Vanderbilt was working with pharmaceutical company Moderna, which went on to develop one of the most widely used COVID-19 vaccines. Parton later said she was surprised to learn about the connection between her gift and the vaccine’s development. “It was a big shock,” she told PEOPLE. “Everybody was calling congratulating me, and I was saying, ‘Well, for what?’ And then of course my fans took it and ran with it: ‘I’m getting the Dolly vaccine! I’m getting the Dolly juice!’ I guess they thought if Dolly got it, it might be pretty safe.”
More than 250 million people globally received the Moderna COVID-19 vaccine, and COVID vaccinations as a whole are estimated to have saved at least 14 million lives in the first year of their rollout. Parton, however, was quick to downplay her role. “I got more credit than I deserved,” she said. “I was just trying to put my money where my heart is.”
Parton’s net worth was estimated at $450 million at the time of her passing, built on an empire spanning music, beauty, apparel, kitchenware, and her East Tennessee theme park, Dollywood. But she spent much of her life giving that fortune away, a commitment rooted in her own upbringing. She grew up with 11 siblings in a small cabin in the Great Smoky Mountains with no running water, electricity, or indoor plumbing. Her mother, Avie Lee, sewed scraps of fabric together to make clothes for the family, and her father, Robert Lee Parton, never learned to read or write — a fact that inspired her education work.
In 1995, Parton started Imagination Library, a program that mails free books to children. It began in her home county and has since grown into a global operation, delivering more than 3 million books a month across the U.S., Canada, the U.K., Ireland, and Australia. In total, the program has shipped more than 300 million books. “Just remember the lessons my family taught me,” Parton said in a video for the program. “Dream big dreams, and learn everything you can. And care for those who care for you — you do all of these things and you can be anyone you want to be.”
Her giving also extended to disaster relief. She raised $700,000 for flood victims near her home in 2021, and in 2024 she contributed $1 million toward Hurricane Helene recovery in East Tennessee, on top of another $1 million from her businesses and the Dollywood Foundation. In 2022, she gave an additional $1 million to the Vanderbilt medical system for pediatric infectious-disease research — the same hospital system where she died this week after a brief battle with cancer.
“I’m kind of addicted to the feeling of giving,” Parton told PEOPLE in 2021. “Knowing that I’m doing something good for someone else.”
