Yes, some connections are there, but not enough to draw these conclusions. There's no need for funding a new foundation (run by neophytes?). The funding system

Yes, some connections are there, but not enough to draw these conclusions. There's no need for funding a new foundation (run by neophytes?). The funding system for health and infectious diseases in particular is pretty good in terms of funneling money to researchers with actual prospects of advancing what we know. Here's the thing: once you're old, or your immune system is compromised (inactive or over-active), the bevy of mechanisms to Keep Things Going itself fails, and then it's mostly a matter of time. Because failures can happen for so many reasons and in so many ways, findings in this context will always be promising, rarely definitive, and almost never helpful. Take EBV and MS. Epidemiologically, EBV is highly prevalent - say 95+% of adults show antibodies, and the rest are likely just not producing enough to detect. So the recent VA study had to start from a base of millions to find a few hundred case/controls and a risk factor of ~37X, with only one patient who developed MS not having demonstrated EBV antibodies. Then analytically, e.g., folks at Stanford have found an EBV antibody that also binds to a protein at the foot of the myelin. Thus, we seem to have a perfect exemplar of auto-immune molecular mimickry. Case closed? Well, you're not going to get rid of EBV soon (a vaccine from ~2000 was abandoned, but Moderna is trialing another). Also, there are many lines of evidence that neurodegeneration starts before the myelin-attacking flares (and the myelin protein at issue is not normally exposed to antibodies). So while the auto-immunity may be excessive and amplify the problem, it's only responding to the neurodegeneration. But we already knew that because even the B-cell ablating therapies for MS only delay disability. So while there's more science behind this discussion than the typical anti-vaxxer's, it's one of the areas that has the highest ratios of valid, narrow findings to actionable medicine: auto-immunity, gut microbiomes, neuropathic pain, etc. Whenever the problems are systemic, you get some benefit from a system reset or dampening (colon cleanses, inflammation reduction), but that's a bit like rebooting the system as a cure for the blue screen.