When you get right down to it, the antibiotic resistance crisis is mostly driven by profitability. It simply isn’t profitable to invest all that money in R&D, clinical trials, and marketing of antibiotics. Despite their obvious critical utility, the demand for antibiotics that are effective against multidrug-resistant pathogens is, overall, not very high.

Meanwhile, it is profitable to feed livestock antibiotics to increase yields, and it is profitable to prescribe azithromycin to patients who demand it because spending an extra fifteen minutes in a futile attempt to convince them that antibiotics are useless for viral infections will significantly cut down on the volume of patients you can see and might jeopardize your customer satisfaction rating.