Pathobiology is pretty arcane. Why should or would a politician, one without any heavy duty biology knowledge, try to advocate for a particular line of research?

My bet is that it would be more effective to find a wealthy private citizen, or group of them, who can directly provide one or more labs with the princely sums needed to replicate the works of Balin, J Miklossy, Stratton, the Brorsons, etc (assuming all these findings are correct) - and also figure out why, at least in Balin and Mikossy's cases, other labs failed to repeat the work (assuming there was any particular reason).

Politics is a screwed up business, anyway. Science is better than politics - at least, I am certain that it is. Naturally, I would be. Most people think their own background is the privaleged window on the world, and their job or role is the hardest and craziest job around. Maybe some of them are more right than others, but they can't all be right. Mostly their conviction is an expression of innate human tribalism. Anyway, when scientists see politics pushing on science my guess is that they naturally resist, out of human nature, out of devotion to the pillars of science, whatever. The only thing they obey is widespread independent replication of clear experiments.

If a foundation were to give a scientist a generous grant with which to try their hand at the Balin, Brorson, Stratton, Miklossy business - and explicitly exclude the possibility of future funding to that scientist - then maybe the results would be seen as pretty objective despite being funded by a group with an explicit interest in infectious causation of chronic disease. I'm guessing. I don't really know much about how power and credibility work in the science world, other than knowing that it is pretty complex.

Certainly, the recent arrival of new-school publishers like PLoS that are already breathing down the neck of Nature, PNAS, and Cell, seems like it may create a more favorable climate for new ideas.