20,000 people die of staph every year in the US (that's 1 in 6 reported cases) and almost all of it is now MRSA (resistant to Methicillin). VRSA (resistant to

20,000 people die of staph every year in the US (that's 1 in 6 reported cases) and almost all of it is now MRSA (resistant to Methicillin). VRSA (resistant to the even stronger vancomycin) and even VISA (immune to vancomycin) constantly pop up in other countries and are basically untreatable. If they get a foothold like MRSA, we can look forward to a lot more staph deaths. Lots of diseases like tuberculosis, C diff, VRE, CRE, gonorrhea, strep, and probably several I haven't thought about all have developed antibiotic resistance to a common antibiotic (tuberculosis is often resistant to multiple antibiotics). Gram-negative bacteria variants immediately gain a huge resistance to current antibiotics. We really need research into new antibiotics to treat these diseases, but there's not much money in creating or producing them. These diseases kill many more people than COVID (especially over a few years). We should be funding them at least as well as we've funded COVID as finding them probably grants another hundred years of treatable diseases just like the discovery of penicillin did.