I've been casually watching Moderna's progress towards a herpes vaccine which IIRC was supposed to come out in 2028.
Herpes is one of those things that obviously isn't as big a deal as cancer but it would be nice to be one less thing to worry about when having sexual encounters with new people, and sufferers of it would love to have some sort of relief from infections and the elimination of the stigma around it. It's also associated with Alzheimer's disease so the cost of not producing this vaccine might be hundreds of billions of dollars and years of life and the prevention of so much suffering down the line.
It's really dismaying to know that this kind of stuff might not come to fruition because of the combination of incompetence and intentional chaos.
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