Agree, on two fronts. Firstly, while pharma collectively spends a lot of money (many, many billions) on drug discovery and development, in the grand scheme of

Agree, on two fronts. Firstly, while pharma collectively spends a lot of money (many, many billions) on drug discovery and development, in the grand scheme of collective global governmental spending, it’s not so very much. If the (e.g.) 20 richest nations got together and shared out the cost according GDP it wouldn’t be too much for them to bear at all. Secondly, as a race we’re currently very bad at ‘global’ cooperation, especially if it requires ’vision’. Even when there’s a strong incentive to cooperate across borders (like, say, an immediate threat from a global pandemic) we mostly sucked. And even relative success stories coming out of the pandemic, like the development of mRNA vaccines spectacularly quickly, had less to do with global coordination and cooperation than might have been the case. It would be wonderful to start to address this broad topic, and the constant threat from antibiotic resistance would seem like a great place to start, before we get to the stage that any operation brings the threat of death by untreatable infection with it.