How Big Pharma companies have lobbied and pressured to be able to gouge on a future Covid-19 vaccine.

This mostly admirable article causes a gratuitous spot of confusion by using the overbroad term "intellectual property".

Use of that term spreads confusion because it generalizes about several unrelated laws, which have so little in common that lumping them together impedes clear thinking about any one of them. The term leads people to adopt shallow, simplistic positions such as "intellectual property is good" or "intellectual property is bad."

In any real issue, it is always better to name the specific law that relates to the issue — in this case, patent law. That way it is easier to study the dimensions of that issue, based on the actual requirements and effects of whichever law is involved.

See https://gnu.org/philosophy/not-ipr.html for more explanation.