Why do we have a lot of antibiotics, but few antiviral meds? I’m not even considering HIV, because I know it’s has a different structure.
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Viruses mostly use your own cells machinery to replicate. Any drug that targets your own cellular machinery would be toxic. In addition, different viruses use very different machinery so one drug tends to only work well for one type of virus (with dine exceptions). As a result there are fewer targets for antiviral drugs that are specific to the virus.
Meanwhile bacteria use different machinery from your cells. There are a lot more targets and a lot more similarity between different bacteria allowing for broader spectrum drugs.
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