Elon Musk doesn't seem like the easiest person to work with, but I'm having a hard time thinking of a more accomplished human.
I mean, I guess some people here subscribe to the notion that space travel is imperative for human survival. In that case, you might argue that each step towards it is more valuable than anything else that does not immediately push towards human space travel. Human space travel will save humanity, your piddly vaccine only saves a couple of hundred million people. But that seems a bizarre argument to make (and maybe that's why one really makes it).
Edit: -3 in one hour? Wow. For what it's worth, I made this comment in good faith.
But to me, the reason the SpaceX success is so noteworthy is that that achievement isn't just new, but ground breaking on so many levels.
* first time a private firm has created, launched and docked a space craft
* done it on a budget several magnitudes less than ever done before
* done it with a fraction of the staff than conventionally used
* opened a new era in space development
Whilst I'm being grossly unfair to medical researchers, at a simplistic level I see most new vaccines like the release of a new model of car - beneficial, but incremental development . Whereas I see the SpaceX achievement as something that broke all the conventional wisdom on how things could be done.
And that's what makes it so special and worth celebrating a bit more than other accomplishments.