U.K. Pitches Radical Investment Plans to Fight Killer Bacteria

Britain will push the world’s biggest economies to develop new ways to pay for the fight against drug-resistant bugs, including a Netflix-style subscription plan for antibiotics aimed at stimulating a broken market, according to a person familiar with the matter.

The U.K. wants to encourage drugmakers to develop new antibiotics amid fears that Covid-19 is obscuring the march of antimicrobial resistance (AMR), which it views as a “silent pandemic,” the person said. Drug-resistance already kills hundreds of thousands of people each year and risks undermining health systems worldwide.

The issue is normally part of Group of Seven health discussions rather than a finance issue. But the British government, which hosts a meeting of finance ministers next month, argues that at its core AMR is an economic problem and requires the world’s biggest markets to act together.