The safety of these vaccines is based on their inability to invade the nervous system and establish life-long latent infections, as opposed to a general attenuation. Unlike other live-attenuated designs, these vaccines are cleared from the body once the immune response from vaccination has matured. In principle, by avoiding attenuation of HSV replication in the mucosa while removing the capacity to infect the nervous system, non-invasive vaccines have the potential to break the safety-efficacy dilemma by producing the strongest possible immune response while maintaining a high degree of safety.