Of the 1,129 people receiving honors, 62% are being recognized for community work, with nearly a quarter recommended for their activities during the pandemic.
One of those was 25-year-old Rhys Mallows, who was awarded a British Empire Medal for helping to repurpose Mallows Bottling, a Welsh firm, to produce more than one million bottles of hand sanitizer following a deal with a Scottish distiller. He estimates that around 81 million hands have been sanitized.
“We’re not scientists, but we really felt that if we can give people little bullets to protect themselves, then it’d make a big difference,” he said.
Siblings John Brownhill and Amanda Guest were also awarded the British Empire Medal for setting up Food4Heroes, which delivered more than 200,000 meals to the National Health Service.
“You see in a time of crisis the strengths of humanity I think”, Brownhill said.
The honors list is also a record-breaking one in terms of diversity, with 15% of recipients from an ethnic minority background. Meanwhile, 9% of those honored had a disability and 5% identified as LGBT. More women, 50.2%, than men feature on the list, for the first time since 2015.
The winners are chosen by civil servants’ committees based on nominations from the government and the public. The awards are usually given out by the queen or a senior royal acting in her place during investitures at Buckingham Palace, but the pandemic has changed all that, not least because the queen has been living at Windsor Castle.
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