The head of the newly formed Korea Disease Control and Prevention Agency (KDCA) and the director of this year's Oscar winner for Best Picture, "Parasite," are on Time magazine's list of this year's 100 most influential people.
KDCA Commissioner Jeong Eun-kyeong appeared in the leaders category, chosen based on her exceptional performance in the country's fight against the COVID-19 pandemic.
President Moon Jae-in praised the doctor in his message to Time, saying, "As the first female chief of KDCA and also a preventive medicine specialist, Commissioner Jeong has enhanced the organization's preparedness."
"Six months before the COVID-19 outbreak, she helped create a manual on response procedures for unidentified mass infections, and conducted drills on a sophisticated emergency-response algorithm."
Quoting a line by Bernard Rieux from the Albert Camus novel "The Plague" saying, "The only way to fight the plague is with decency," the president said he "believes Commissioner Jeong's decency and dedication are indeed a story worth telling — one that will serve as an inspiration for the many Commissioner Jeongs around the world desperately fighting COVID-19, and for humanity as we advance toward the post-COVID-19 era."
Director Bong Joon-ho was chosen as an artist.
Actress Tilda Swinton, who starred in Bong's 2013 film "Snowpiercer," shared her thoughts on the director. "This is the filmmaker who, this year, has risen into the 2020 vision of the entire cinepassionate planet like a new sun. Whip-smart, highly skilled, supremely cineliterate, exuberant, irreverent, self-determining, deeply romantic, with a voracious delight in the absurd, highly principled, precision-tuned, compassionate to the last: his films have always been all this," she wrote.
Source: http://www.korea.net/
