Again, I think the research and techniques are really cool, but your comment seems quite valid to me.
You can go blind, lose your sense of smell permanently, and get encephalitis from bad herpes outbreaks. It isn't just an inconvenience to those people.
And because herpes infects practically the entirety of the population, these problems are more common than you would expect.
And that's before we start chewing through all the viral data were going to get due to everybody actually paying attention to symptoms due to Covid. I suspect that the "viral hypothesis" people are going to have a field day for the next 10 years.
Having a vaccine is probably about the slowest way to figure that out, but if it turns out to be true then the problem is already solved.
According to the article, the researchers are currently focused on HSV-1, and may work their way to HSV-2.
At first glance, they're certainly reluctant to do so.
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