why is it so hard to make a virus killing drug?
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Viruses hijack the cellular mechanism used to build required proteins, and feed new instructions (the viral DNA) to replicate the virus as many times as possible before the cell dies. It is very difficult to stop that process without interfering with the required cellular activity needed to keep the cell and body working.
However, there are antiviral drugs. For HIV and Hepatitis B, the antiviral drugs are nucleotide/nucleoside analogs – the virus includes a transcriptase enzyme that reads the viral DNA and replicates it by grabbing nucleotides in the cell. These analogs get grabbed by the viral transcriptase because they look/function like a real nucleotide/nucleoside, but they actually terminate the strand before it is complete. If you keep enough of these nucleoside analogs in cells, you can restrict or prevent viral DNA replication without impacting normal DNA transcription too much. Some analogs are preferentially selected by the viral transcriptase, but not all.
For viruses such as HIV/HepB, this means the antivirals are very good at controlling the virus, but not getting rid of it entirely.
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