2:1000000 million chance of getting brain damage from Herpes, page-64

The main point I was trying to make to impartial readers was that the market for herpes vaccine is very difficult to predict with any certainty, but that it was definitely less than any figure quoted on these boards by a long mile.

Comments such as more people in USA have herpes than the entire population of Australia are pure example of this.

The broadly agreed knowns go like this; around 50% of people with HSV-2 are unaware that they have it and it has zero impact on their life what so ever.
Of the other 50% a majority will see signs of shedding and will either disappear or they will take a pill, use some cream and the signs will never appear again and be forgotten.
This leaves a very small amount of people who have recurrent signs, use condoms and or other preventative measures and learn to live with it. This would be the target market and you would think most of the people in this category would be interested in taking the vaccine. This is a very small percentage of the numbers bounced around here.

Few other things to address:

Nobody is going to be rolling out Vaccine's for herpes in schools, or going to to the doctors to get an injection 'just in case', there are bigger day to day problems out there for people to preoccupy themselves with, compared to one of the most harmless diseases out there. Plus I'm pretty sure the current clinical trials are looking at therapeutic treatment and not preventative i.e injecting people who already have Herpes.

There is no record of anybody dying from Herpes alone.

The idea of 'big pharmas' around the world crawling over each other to find a vaccine for HSV-2 is just not true. Genecea and Agenus are biotechs equivalent to that of AHZ compared to Nasdaq standards, and far the multi national pharmas of the world.

A HSV-2 vaccine would be most useful to AIDS sufferers who also have Herpes to minimise the risk of progression, and to sufferers of recurrent shedding who are convinced and or embarrassed by the constant reappearance of signs.