Covid is over now, may as well breed some super bacteria
I mean it says right there that they still need a prescription, they’re just empowering pharmacists to do it. Pharmacists have degrees in their specialty and often advise doctors on different drugs and whatnot. People can’t just go in and get them off the shelf.
Also it’s not like the GPs have been doing particularly well when it comes to overprescribing these things.
Oh, that’s not a big deal. At least in the US, pharmacists are doctors and their job is to know how drugs work and what they do. Prescribing first-line antibiotics to treat simple infections should be well within their wheelhouse. The biggest problems I see is adding more workload to people who, in the US at least, are already drowning due to callous understaffing.
On the one hand, medical gatekeepers sucks when they’re like the dumb-ass, racist nurse who didn’t believe I had pneumonia
For what it’s worth, without the lab testing you wouldn’t know whether it was bacterial/viral/fungal/mycoplasma pneumonia or something with secondary pneumonia. Take the wrong antibiotic and it does nothing while your condition worsens. Take them for viral pneumonia and they do nothing while the condition resolves on its own. Medical gatekeeping is there for a reason.
Oh joy, I’m looking forward to the inevitable next plague that people will deny exists as they’re choking to death on their own lung fluids or whatever next horror awaits
