[david_b]

Yeah, there is something that is regularly overlooked about developing antibiotics: new ones end up on a shelf as the new last resort. If you've got a timeframe (imposed by patent lifetimes) in which you have to recoup your investment, that is a shitty situation for a pharma company to put itself in. "It's for the public good" is not the kind of due dilligence many shareholders like...

[noloqy]

You can consider this problem in two ways. Either you see the need for increasing the patent lifetime - at least for certain drugs - or you consider this a weakness of a privatized pharmaceutical industry, and take it as an argument in favor of placing the government in charge of pharmaceutical developments.