[pmulcahy11b]

Some antibiotics, like Penicillin, are actually relatively easy to make. The guy who invented Penicillin did it by accident -- he was experimenting with bacteria and got called away for several days and when he got back, he found that the mold on the bread he was using as a growth medium for the bacteria was killing the bacteria. After that, other scientists began experimenting with molds and bacteria. Penicillin could probably have been developed a couple of centuries earlier, but no one recognized the mold for what it was. So to an extent, some antibiotic manufacture might continue.

The tricky problem we have in T2K 2000 (and IRL) is that there are so many antibiotic-resistant strains of bacteria. There are a lot of antibiotics that are almost never used anymore because they almost never work. (When's the last time that a doctor bothered to try simple Penicillin on you? I haven't been given Penicillin since I was a teenager.) And modern antibiotics, particularly the top-line ones, can't be made by simply growing them on some medium -- they're the result of long years of genetic engineering and selective breeding. Some of them aren't even the results of simple molds. And modern antibiotic manufacturing methods are required for their manufacture. No one will be making them in T2K 2000.