Country music superstar and coronavirus vaccine funder Dolly Parton twice refused to accept a Presidential Medal of Freedom offered by Donald Trump, NPR reports.
In an interview with the Today show on NBC, Parton said she turned down the first offer because her husband was ill, and she refused the second offer because she did not want to travel during the coronavirus pandemic.
A key funder of the Moderna vaccine research, Parton would not commit to accepting the award from President Joe Biden. “Now I feel like if I take it, I’ll be doing politics, so I’m not sure.” She added, “I don’t work for those awards. It’d be nice, but I’m not sure that I even deserve it. But that’s a nice compliment for people to think that I might deserve it.”