Thanks for your link kiwi33.

You said: "Some independent investigators have tried and failed to replicate some of his reported findings ..."

Yes, but the review article also says that some researchers did report similar results. As their concluding section states: "...studies have shown that certain infectious agents, such as HSV-1 and C. pneumoniae, can induce AD neuropathologic changes in vitro and in vivo."

And as Balin himself says in the interview: "Not enough neuropathologists understand how these types of organisms can promote inflammation and the generation of amyloid and/or tau pathology even though we and many others have demonstrated this experimentally after finding these organisms in human AD brains."

I also note that the review article was accepted for publication in 2012, and that the Balin interview was published in 2017.

Overall though, I would agree that "a lot more work is needed before we know what is going on".