In the closing scenes of H.G. Wells’ timeless classic, ‘War of the Worlds’ invading arachnids from the planet Mars spill from the control compartments of their omnipotent towering armored tripod machines, covered in fungal infections and drowning in their own weeping mucosa. 

The narrated epilogue explains the Martians’ rapid and inevitable demise, describing their immunological inability to fend off the microscopic onslaught of Earth’s biome, and an exterminated defeat by a microbial army that no human military could have won. The Martians didn’t have an immune system capable of withstanding a new world of germs.  

Without the immunological “memory” earned by eons of germ exposure and antibody production, a vestigial function we call “transgenerational immunity,” the human race would suffer a similar extinction fate. Thanks to apparent immunological crippling caused both by COVID-19 infection and more pervasively by the mRNA and adenovirus COVID-19 vaccines, populations around the world are now exhibiting exactly that sort of fragile vulnerability, specifically to a previously rare class of fungal infections of the lungs known as mucormycosis. 

Whether inside our homes or outside, the world we inhabit is a mold paradise, filled with the wafting spores of single cellular organisms that emanate from myriad sources, wherever moisture, decay and optimum temperatures coincide, mold exists. Simply put, mold and fungal growth is everywhere and not accidentally. Molds serve the invaluable purpose of facilitating the rapid and symbiotic biodegradation of organic materials. Every lifeform on the planet that sprouts, hatches, lives and grows will at some point become a food source to be consumed and broken down by fungal degradation.  Such is the cycle of life.

Normally, and in healthy populations, the diverse catalog of fungal spores that live in, on, around and among us pose virtually no risk to human health. Our immune systems have seen, fought and defeated them all. But suddenly doctors in nations around the world are reporting dramatic increases in severe and fatal fungal infections, especially in the lungs, by fungal strains once considered harmless in the vast majority of patients. 

Until now.  

Public health authorities in India recently declared a nationwide medical emergency over mucormycosis respiratory infection rates, specifically in patients who either have had or are battling COVID-19, or have had the COVID-19 vaccinations. 

According to the American Society for Microbiology, India’s exploding mucormycosis death rate is cause for scientific inquiry. 

Mucormycosis, a fungal infection caused by ubiquitous environmental molds, such as Rhizopus arrhizus, Rhizomucor pusillus, Apophysomyces variabilis and Lichtheimia corymbifera, is surging as a COVID-19-associated infection at unprecedented rates throughout India and raising alarm bells around the world. 

From May 5-July 12, 2021, 41,512 cases and 3,554 deaths were attributed to this rare, but life-threatening fungal infection. The majority of those cases occurred during active SARS-CoV-2 outbreaks in India, prompting the Central Government of India to declare a mucormycosis epidemic on May 10, 2021.

During a World Microbe Forum session about emerging pathogens, Dr. Ilan Schwartz summarized the threat. 
“Hospitals are going from seeing maybe 2 patients with mucormycosis in a month to 500-600 patients being admitted concurrently. This is unprecedented. We’ve never seen a fungal infection with this kind of rapid surge and this much devastation,” he said. 

While Schwartz acknowledged that the reasons for the surge are complicated and not completely understood, characteristics of the causative microbes, their unwitting hosts and the relationships between them do provide important context to this story.

“Possibly the most feared infection in all of infectious diseases is mucormycosis,” Schwartz provocatively stated. “It’s an extremely morbid and deadly fungal infection, but it’s caused by ubiquitous, environmental molds that we’re breathing in all the time. If your immune system is functioning as it should, this is not a problem; but a range of different immunodeficiencies can predispose someone to invasion [by] the inhaled spores.”

If the fungus takes hold, those spores germinate to produce hyphae that invade blood vessels and surrounding tissue, blocking blood flow and causing tissue death as they spread. Most commonly, infection occurs in the sinuses and brain. 

Without aggressive interventions, such as antifungals and removal of dead tissue (which is disfiguring and invasive), mucormycosis is rapidly fatal. Prior to its association with COVID-19, the overall mortality rate of mucormycosis was estimated to be 54%, and disseminated mucormycosis was nearly 96% fatal.

With an awakened humanity understandably fatigued by institutional alarmism about any aspect of public health or emerging threat, generating proportional awareness of sudden and unique changes in mankind’s relationship to the once harmless microbes around us could prove difficult to impossible.  People are too tired of it all to care about new warnings or concerns.

Even more troublingly, patriots and COVID-19 skeptics confronted with rising statistics for fatal pneumonia and bacterial infections during the pandemic have invariably cited those numbers erroneously to debunk the actual lethality of COVID-19 and to suggest that the Sars-COV-2 virus is not directly responsible for a rising death rate. 

What pneumonia death numbers from the height of the pandemic actually suggest is that significant numbers of COVID-19 patients were immunocompromised via their exposure to the SHC014 spike protein and the resultant interferences with healthy T-lymphocytic response and succumbed to run-of-the-mill pneumococcal and fungal lung infections that would otherwise be harmless or mild under appropriate and normative immunological response.

Immunocompromised hosts are significantly predisposed to mucormycosis and with evidence mounting regarding acute and seemingly permanent damage to the human immune system inflicted by COVID-19 vaccines, signs of an erased transgenerational immunity to common bacteria and a hundredfold rise in fatal infections by previously innocuous and ubiquitous environmental fungi should spark at least nominal curiosity about how mankind’s defenses to the microbial “soup” of our surroundings may have been altered and to what end.

The implications that any portion of the species no longer has the ability to fend off broader infection by previously harmless germs and spores that we breathe and bathe in on a daily basis are obvious and troubling. 

Even marginal disruption of our hard-won transgenerational immunity, earned to the toll of billions of lives lost over millennia would prove catastrophic to human longevity and species survival. 

But then, maybe someone somewhere knew all of this. 

And maybe that’s the point.