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akoboldfrying 3 hours ago

> there would be an added pressure on the pharma industry to innovate in antibiotic development by accelerating the loss of existing antibiotic efficacy through the evolution of resistance

You're joking, right?

Total antibiotic resistance is what we're trying to minimise, remember. You're proposing to achieve that in the long term by making it worse in the short term, but the only way that makes sense is if there is actually an abundance of new antibiotics "out there" waiting to be discovered, and the binding constraint currently limiting their development is that pharmaceutical companies can't be bothered researching them. But that is obviously not true -- steadily growing resistance has raised alarm for decades, and any pharma company that could produce a genuinely new antibiotic today would make immediate bank.

IOW, the incentives are already there and they aren't helping, so why take the extra step of making things deliberately worse?