The Washington Post - USA (2022-05-02)

MONDAY, MAY 2 , 2022. THE WASHINGTON POST EZ RE A

in 1973.

“Fritz and Joan, they embraced

me,” Biden said. “They helped me

find my purpose in a sea of dark-

ness and pain.... They kept me

engaged. They helped me get up

when it was easy to give up.”

Biden recalled that when he

was asked to be Barack Obama’s

vice president, one of his first calls

was to Mondale, another longtime

senator who had served as second-

in-command to a relative Wash-

ington newcomer. Mondale re-

formed the way vice presidents

conceptualized their role, he said,

turning it into more of a direct

partnership, and Biden tried to

use that as a model.

“He told me, in essence, that the

vice presidency holds no inherent

power. None. Zero,” Biden said.

“The vice presidency is merely —

and it’s true — is a reflection of a

relationship with the president of

the United States.”

And their relationship en-

dured; Biden had been on the

phone with him not long before

Mondale passed away.

Mondale died at age 93 in April

2021, but his funeral was delayed

because of the pandemic. He

served as a state attorney general,

senator and vice president, and

later as ambassador to Japan un-

der President Bill Clinton.

Mondale was also the Demo-

cratic nominee for president in

1984, and among his most notable

moves was putting the first wom-

an on a major party presidential

ticket, selecting then-Rep. Geral-

dine Ferraro (D-N.Y.) as his run-

ning mate. They lost to President

Ronald Reagan in a landslide, but

Ferraro paved the way for such

figures as Sarah Palin, Hillary

Clinton and Vice President Harris.

“Walter Mondale was a giant of

the Senate, a formidable vice pres-

ident and a truth-telling presiden-

tial nominee of his party who nev-

er stopped standing by principle,”

said historian Jon Meacham, who

stressed the sweep of Mondale’s

career and legacy on civil rights,

women’s rights and environmen-

tal protection.

Even with the presence of na-

tional figures like Biden, Sunday’s

ceremony had a hometown flavor,

abounding with Norwegian jokes

and references to Minnesota fig-

ures. Sen. Tina Smith (D-Minn.),

who counts Mondale as a mentor

from her days as a political volun-

teer, said she met Mondale for

lunch 10 days before his death.

“A lot of us who knew Mr. Mon-

dale, we started out thinking of

him as a hero and we wound up

daring to think of him as a friend,”

Smith said.

Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D-Minn.)

said it was Mondale who first en-

couraged her to run for the Senate.

He was also the first, she said, to

teach pundits how to pronounce

her last time. And when she spoke

at the Democratic National Con-

vention in 2004, he warned her

about the dangers of relying on a

Teleprompter.

So she memorized the speech —

and the Teleprompter that night

broke.

“I could see Walter Mondale in

the front row,” Klobuchar said. “I

made eye contact with him, and I

have never seen a more pointed

I-told-you-so nod in my life. I nod-

ded back.”

On a gray day in Minneapolis,

the lobby of Northrop Auditorium

at the University of Minnesota,

where the service was held, was

covered with photos of Mondale

fishing, hunting and flashing a

smile.

Some attendees recalled in in-

terviews how Mondale touched

their lives. Dennis Marchetti said

they went on hunting trips i n Gre-

aney, Minn., near the Canadian

border. “He was a very good shot,”

Marchetti added.

Ruth Usem, 82, met Mondale

over many fundraising events she

held for Ferraro in her home, re-

calling vividly his sense of humor.

Ishmael Befera, 17, smiled at a

photo of himself fishing in Ma-

natu, Canada, with the former vice

president, who had been friends

with his grandfather.

“He’d say, ‘Patience is key to

catching a fish,’ ” Befera recalled.

“If you have patience, everything

will come to you.”

BY SHEILA REGAN

AND MATT VISER

minneapolis — President Biden
on Sunday paid tribute to one of
his closest friends and mentors,
the man who guided him in some
of the darkest times in his life,
taught him how to be a senator
and advised him on the vice presi-
dency.
In a 30-minute speech that was
at times humorous and other
times emotional, Biden called for-
mer vice president Walter Mon-
dale “one of the great giants in
American history — and that’s not
hyperbole.”
“He was one of the finest men
you’ve ever known,” Biden said.
“One of the most decent people
I’ve ever dealt with, and one of the
toughest, smartest men I’ve ever

worked with.”

Biden has made it a point to

attend funerals — this was the

second for him within a week,

after former secretary of state

Madeleine Albright’s service last

Wednesday. From Colin Powell to

former Senate majority leader

Harry M. Reid (D-Nev.), Biden has

used funerals to express his empa-

thy, emphasize bipartisanship and

pay tribute to what he sees as the

long-standing traditions of Amer-

ican public life that have been

disrupted in recent years.

The president’s remarks at the

Mondale memorial were especial-

ly personal. He recounted how

Mondale and his wife helped give

Biden’s life purpose when Biden’s

wife and daughter were killed in a

car accident, just before he was

sworn into office as a new senator

Biden pays tribute to

friend, mentor M ondale

and the L (“leucine”) is what is
there after the mutation. (The mu-
tation is caused by a change in one
nucleotide, or “letter,” in the ge-
netic code of the virus; three nu-
cleotides encode for an amino
acid.)
The virus is spreading today in
the United States on an immuno-
logical landscape much different
from the one it first encountered
in early 2020. Between vaccina-
tions and infections, there aren’t
many people entirely naive to the
virus. The latest CDC data suggest
the virus has infected nearly
200 million people in the nation,
which has a population of about
330 million. Among children and
teenagers, about three out of four
have been infected, the CDC esti-
mates.
For the new CDC study, re-
searchers looked at blood samples
from thousands of people and
searched for an antibody that is
found after a natural infection,
but not found after vaccination.
The CDC concluded that the omi-
cron variant plowed through the
U.S. population during the winter
almost as if it were an entirely new
virus. The country by then was
largely vaccinated. And yet 80 mil-
lion people, approximately, be-
came infected for the first time in
that omicron wave.
On the family tree of this coro-
navirus, omicron is a distant cous-

strains infect a single host simul-

taneously and their genes become

entangled. The recombination

process is the origin of what’s

known as omicron XE. That re-

combinant probably emerged

from a person co-infected with the

original omicron variant and the

BA.2 subvariant.

It was always possible in theory,

but the identification of actual re-

combinants provides “proof of

concept,” as Jeremy Luban, a virol-

ogist at the University of Massa-

chusetts Medical School, puts it.

The worst-case scenario would

be the emergence of a variant or

recombinant that renders current

vaccines largely ineffective at

blocking severe disease. But so far,

that hasn’t happened. And no re-

combinant has spread like omi-

cron or other recent variants and

subvariants.

This is the first catastrophic

pandemic to occur in the age of

modern genomic sequencing. A

century ago, no one knew what a

coronavirus was, and even a “vi-

rus” was a relatively new concept.

But today, with millions of sam-

ples of the virus analyzed at the

genetic level, scientists can track

mutations virtually in real time

and watch the virus evolve. Scien-

tists across the planet have up-

loaded millions of sequences to

the database known as GISAID.

Genomic sequencing has a ma-

jor limitation in that, although

scientists can track changes in the

genome, they don’t automatically

know what each of those changes

is doing. Which mutations matter

most is a question that can be

discerned through experiments,

modeling or epidemiological sur-

veillance, but it’s not always sim-

ple or obvious.

Erica Saphire, president of the

La Jolla Institute for Immunology,

speculates that omicron has muta-

tions that have changed the virus

in ways not yet understood but

which make it more resistant to

antibody-mediated neutraliza-

tion.

“It may have acquired some

new trick that we haven’t uncov-

ered yet,” Saphire said. “It’s harder

to neutralize than I would have

expected, based on the number of

mutations alone.”

A reality check comes from Jer-

emy Kamil, associate professor of

microbiology and immunology at

Louisiana State University Health

Shreveport: “These are all SARS-

CoV-2.”

What he means is that these are

all variations of the same virus,

despite what seems like a tremen-

dous amount of mutation. Corre-

spondingly, someone who gets in-

fected with one of these new vari-

ants has the same disease as peo-

ple who got infected previously.

“They got covid,” he said.

in of delta, alpha and the other

variants that had spread earlier —

it came out of virologic left field.

No one is sure of the origin of

omicron, but many disease ex-

perts assume it came from an im-

munocompromised patient with a

lengthy illness, and the virus con-

tinued to use mutations to evade

the immune system’s efforts to

clear it.

Omicron was mercifully less

likely to kill a person than previ-

ous variants. But infectious-

disease experts are clear on this

point: Future variants could be

more pathogenic.

As if mutation wasn’t enough of

a problem, the virus has another

trick up its sleeve: recombination.

It happens when two distinct

JEROME DELAY/ASSOCIATED PRESS

Sandile Cele, a researcher at the Africa Health Research Institute in Durban, South Africa, deals with

the omicron variant of the coronavirus late last year when cases were on the rise.

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