It is true that doctors and others are, generally speaking, required and threatened to push and sell and talk about and market certain drugs, medicine, vaccines, pills, prescriptions, etc., by Big Pharma and others. I some cases, doctors are threatened with losing their license to practice medicine and sometimes worse.
What you are talking about with herpes is one example of these things that are happening. You can also look at AIDs and flu vaccines. I am more for natural remedies first but with some exceptions.
And things do get rebranded more often than we know. True, people make money when they make us feel bad, sick, in need of certain things. In some cases, it is all about the cradle to grave hook. And they try their best to gain monopolies in what they sell, in their control, over their customers, over as many people as possible.
I'm definitely not anti-vax by any means; I absolutely think vaccines are life-saving and necessary, especially in children. However, I think that it is exactly this kind of behavior and this kind of power imbalance--having a literal monopoly over our lives--that allows anti-vax rumors to spread and persist. Unfortunately, we depend on these people to save our lives, and we don't have a choice until patents run out. It's the researcher's job to look at the history and separate out evidence from speculation on a case-by-case basis. I don't think it's necessarily in the pharmaceutical industry's nature to fabricate placebos and sell them as medicine or anything, simply because they need to get through clinical trials, but it's definitely in their nature to create medications and find ways to exploit common conditions to increase sales, or to corner people into buying their medicine at ridiculously inflated prices.
I do not get flu vaccines and I do not get the flu and many people get the flu vaccine and then they get the flu and the flu viruses have been mutating again and again kind of like how germs become super germs in hospitals as the germs adapt and resist and evolve or mutate.