Hopefully Tom Hanks Is In The Vaccine
Tom Hanks is beloved until proven otherwise. He was cast as Mr. Rogers, and people were fine with that. He's one of the few famous people we can point to as an unequivocal beacon of good in an increasingly bleak world. If you could get a little bit of Tom Hanks in you, wouldn't you want it? Well, even if you answered no, you might at some point, since Tom and his wife Rita Wilson told NPR's Wait, Wait ... Don't Tell Me! that they donated their blood in the hope that it will lead to the development of a COVID vaccine.
To be fair, donating blood to help find a cure is nothing unique to their experience. Tons of people who had coronavirus, as Hanks and Wilson did, now have antibodies floating around in their plasma that researchers want to get their hands on. Vaccine developers get horny thinking about taking antibodies for a spin in a centrifuge, then squirting some into the yearning mouth of a beaker that can be looked at longingly in the light until the researcher climaxes by saying "Hmm, fascinating," with a satisfying grunt.
Knowing Tom Hanks' blood will probably, in some small way, contribute to a vaccine that will save us all, brings with it the hope that one of the side effects is slowly developing traits reminiscent of Tom Hanks. We'll all suddenly notice we've become less viral and more congenial. We'll find ourselves with renewed lung capacity but also filled with charming wit that makes it easy to slip into the role of a charming everyman. We may even wake up one morning to find two Oscars on our mantle and as the parents of a white rapper son born in Los Angeles who speaks in Jamaican patois.
One day we will find ourselves free from the coronavirus' menace then, soon after that, in the dead of night, our bodies will grotesquely transform, clothes shredding as we have made the full transition into Tom Hanks. Once everyone is Hanks, no one will be special. Only under these strict, admittedly preposterous, but still very plausible circumstances will the cure be worse than the vaccine.
Luis can be found on Twitter and Facebook. Catch him on the "In Broad Daylight" podcast with Cracked alums Adam Tod Brown and Ian Fortey! Check out his regular contributions to Macaulay Culkin's BunnyEars.com and his "Meditation Minute" segments on the Bunny Ears podcast. Listen to the first episode on Youtube!
Top Image: Dick Thomas Johnson/Wikimedia Commons
