Entrepreneur and business magnate Elon Musk was on Monday, 13 December announced as Time Magazine’s 2021 'Person of the Year'. Meanwhile, vaccine scientists Kizzmekia Corbett, Barney Graham, Katalin Kariko and Drew Weissman were announced Time Magazine’s 2021 'Heroes of the Year'.
In it’s description of Musk, TIME wrote:
"The richest man in the world does not own a house and has recently been selling off his fortune. He tosses satellites into orbit and harnesses the sun; he drives a car he created that uses no gas and barely needs a driver. With a flick of his finger, the stock market soars or swoons."
“This is the man who aspires to save our planet and get us a new one to inhabit: clown, genius, edgelord, visionary, industrialist, showman, cad; a madcap hybrid of Thomas Edison, P.T. Barnum, Andrew Carnegie and Watchmen’s Doctor Manhattan, the brooding, blue-skinned man-god who invents electric cars and moves to Mars.”Time Magazine
The Heroes of the Year
Describing the Heroes of The Year as ’The Miracle Workers’, TIME, further, wrote:
“The four were hardly alone in those efforts: scientists around the world have produced COVID-19 vaccines using a variety of platforms and technologies. Many—like the shots from Oxford-AstraZeneca and Johnson & Johnson–Janssen—came from more established methods, modified with impressive speed to fight a new virus. Still, Corbett, Graham, Kariko and Weissman achieved a breakthrough of singular importance, introducing an innovative and highly effective vaccine platform, based on mRNA, that will impact our health and well-being far beyond this pandemic.”
"There were times in their careers when, deep in the work that would ultimately rescue humanity, Kizzmekia Corbett, Barney Graham, Katalin Kariko and Drew Weissman felt as though the problems they faced were ones they alone cared about solving," TIME Magazine further wrote, adding that "...exposing the inner workings of how viruses survive and thrive is what made the COVID-19 vaccines possible."
Earlier in 2020, America’s then President-elect Joe Biden and Vice President-elect Kamala Harris were chosen by Time Magazine as ‘Person of the Year’.
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