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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The problem is always how you can kill something *selectively*. It means that you kill that and only that. So for example you van use fire to kill a virus, but it kills the person too. Fire is not selective.
In biology, if you want to kill something selectively, you need to find an important biochemical process in it, that is *different* from those things that you don’t want to kill. And you need a chemical that blocks one version of the process, but doesn’t block other things. Those herbicides that kill one plant but don’t kill the other, work on the same principle.
So bacteria are living beings on their own. They are evolutionary very far from us, and we have a lot of differences. They have cell walls, we don’t. They have different structure for their ribosomes and some other key processes. So you can find a chemical that blocks the building process of cell walls. No problem for us, hard life for them. Or a chemical that blocks the bacterial version of ribosomes but doesn’t block ours.
Viruses on the contrary use our biochemical processes to build themselves. A good virus is biochemically very close to the host. They use the same ribosomes (ours). They have actually only a very few processes that we do not have that they bring with themselves.
One such process can be the one that the so called retroviruses bring along, which is inserting their genes into the host genes. For that they use a special stuff that we don’t have. And imagine this special stuff can actually be blocked without killing the person thus can block the virus with a chemical that is harmless for us.
But unfortunately it is only one family of viruses, and there are many other viruses that don’t have any special blockable process.
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