NEW YORK (AP) – Doctors, nurses and others fighting Ebola have been named Time’s 2014 Person of the Year, the magazine announced Wednesday.
The runners-up included Ferguson, Missouri, protesters; Russian President Vladimir Putin; Kurdish Regional Government President Massoud Barzani; and Jack Ma, the China-based founder of e-commerce giant Alibaba.
In an article on the Time website, Editor Nancy Gibbs praised “the people in the field, the special forces of Doctors Without Borders/Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF), the Christian medical-relief workers of Samaritan’s Purse and many others from all over the world” who “fought side by side with local doctors and nurses, ambulance drivers and burial teams.”
Gibbs noted that the disease also struck doctors and nurses.
“The rest of the world can sleep at night because a group of men and women are willing to stand and fight,” she wrote. “For tireless acts of courage and mercy, for buying the world time to boost its defenses, for risking, for persisting, for sacrificing and saving, the Ebola fighters are Time’s 2014 Person of the Year.”