Chinese President Xi Jinping on Tuesday awarded state honors to four scientists for their contribution to the country's fight against the coronavirus disease, during a ceremony in Beijing's Great Hall of the People
BEIJING (Pakistan Point News / Sputnik - 08th September, 2020) Chinese President Xi Jinping on Tuesday awarded state honors to four scientists for their contribution to the country's fight against the coronavirus disease, during a ceremony in Beijing's Great Hall of the People.
The Medal of the Republic, the country's highest state award, was bestowed on Zhong Nanshan, a renowned epidemiologist and respiratory disease expert. A member of the Chinese academy of Engineering, Zhong went to Wuhan in January to fight COVID-19 at the early stages of the outbreak, and one of the first Chinese officials who warned against travel to Wuhan and called for quarantining all coronavirus-positive people. In September, Zhong was selected as a member of an independent panel appointed by the World Health Organization to review the global COVID-19 response.
The honorary title of the People's Hero was conferred on Zhang Boli, also a member of the Chinese Academy of Engineering and a dean at Tianjin University of Science and Technology, who worked on research of the coronavirus treatment by combining Western medicine and Chinese traditional medicine.
The People's Hero title was also conferred on Zhang Dingyu, the head of the Jinyintan hospital in Wuhan, and Chen Wei, a military medical scientist who contributed to the development of a coronavirus vaccine.
