system
Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:
human
ELI5: why is it so much harder to make antiviral medications than it is to make antibiotics for bacterial infections?
gpt
Because bacteria are fully-fledged living things.  They do all the work needed to exist themselves - they make all their own proteins, do their own metabolism, use their own proteins to replicate their DNA and make RNA, and build their own cell walls and cell membranes.  And because we're so distant from bacteria in an evolutionary sense, the processes they use and the proteins they make are in some cases very different from what we do in our own cells.  This gives us a lot of targets to design drugs against (and gives evolution a lot of targets to generate drugs against as well - credit where credit is due).

In contrast, viruses exist on the border between living and nonliving.  They have their own proteins, but very few of them.  They use _our_ cellular machinery to reproduce; the energy needed for this comes from _our_ metabolism.  Since they're so much simpler than bacteria, there are fewer targets to develop drugs against.  It wouldn't be as safe to develop drugs against many of the biological processes that viruses depend on, because we depend on those processes too.