This, so much this. It's very hard to make an antibiotics company work, not so much because you can't make money on the pill itself, but because it will never a

This, so much this. It's very hard to make an antibiotics company work, not so much because you can't make money on the pill itself, but because it will never actually get used unless the infection is dire. This means that your market is microscopic and you can't recover the cost of developing the drug in the first place. Antibiotics are special and should be incentivized using a different system. I've heard ideas like an international government compact that awards a large, multi-billion $ prize in exchange for the patent and full generic production immediately. This would allow a consortium/company to do very well for itself but the whole world to benefit in the aggregate for very little cost.