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beardedmrbean · 2 months

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Vaccines that protect against severe illness, death and lingering long Covid-19 symptoms from a coronavirus infection were linked to small increases in neurological, blood, and heart-related conditions in the largest global vaccine safety study to date.

The rare events – identified early in the pandemic – included a higher risk of heart-related inflammation from mRNA shots made by Pfizer Inc, BioNTech SE, and Moderna Inc, and an increased risk of a type of blood clot in the brain after immunisation with viral-vector vaccines such as the one developed by the University of Oxford and made by AstraZeneca Plc.

The viral-vector jabs were also tied to an increased risk of Guillain-Barre syndrome, a neurological disorder in which the immune system mistakenly attacks the peripheral nervous system.

More than 13.5 billion doses of Covid vaccines have been administered globally over the past three years, saving over 1 million lives in Europe alone. Still, a small proportion of people immunised were injured by the shots, stoking debate about their benefits versus harms.

The new research, by the Global Vaccine Data Network, was published in the journal Vaccine last week.

The research looked for 13 medical conditions that the group considered “adverse events of special interest” among 99 million vaccinated individuals in eight countries, aiming to identify higher-than-expected cases after a Covid shot.

Myocarditis, or inflammation of the heart muscle, was consistently identified following a first, second and third dose of mRNA vaccines, the study found.

The highest increase in the observed-to-expected ratio was seen after a second jab with the Moderna shot. A first and fourth dose of the same vaccine was also tied to an increase in pericarditis, or inflammation of the thin sac covering the heart.

Researchers found a statistically significant increase in cases of Guillain-Barre syndrome within 42 days of an initial Oxford-developed ChAdOx1 or “Vaxzevria” shot that wasn’t observed with mRNA vaccines.

Based on the background incidence of the condition, 66 cases were expected – but 190 events were observed.

ChAdOx1 was linked to a threefold increase in cerebral venous sinus thrombosis, a type of blood clot in the brain, identified in 69 events, compared with an expected 21.

The small risk led to the vaccine’s withdrawal or restriction in Denmark and multiple other countries. Myocarditis was also linked to a third dose of ChAdOx1 in some, but not all, populations studied.

Possible safety signals for transverse myelitis – spinal cord inflammation – after viral-vector vaccines was identified in the study.

So was acute disseminated encephalomyelitis – inflammation and swelling in the brain and spinal cord – after both viral-vector and mRNA vaccines.

Seven cases of acute disseminated encephalomyelitis after vaccination with the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine were observed, versus an expectation of two.

The adverse events of special interest were selected based on pre-established associations with immunisation, what was already known about immune-related conditions and preclinical research. The study didn’t monitor for postural orthostatic tachycardia syndrome, or POTS, that some research has linked with Covid vaccines.

Exercise intolerance, excessive fatigue, numbness and “brain fog” were among common symptoms identified in more than 240 adults experiencing chronic post-vaccination syndrome in a separate study conducted by the Yale School of Medicine. The cause of the syndrome isn’t yet known, and it has no diagnostic tests or proven remedies.

The Yale research aims to understand the condition to relieve the suffering of those affected and improve the safety of vaccines, said Harlan Krumholz, a principal investigator of the study, and director of the Yale New Haven Hospital Centre for Outcomes Research and Evaluation.

“Both things can be true,” Krumholz said in an interview. “They can save millions of lives, and there can be a small number of people who’ve been adversely affected.”

#nunyas news #this is gonna go over well

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gsirvitor · 6 months

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mostlysignssomeportents · 2 years

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The (billionaires') case against billionaires

The downsides of a world with billionaires in it are well-rehearsed: billionaires can convert their vast wealth to power, and use that power to turn their whims and pet theories into policy failures that affect millions — or even billions — of people.

Take Bill Gates. Forget all the conspiracy theories about Gates and vaccines — it’s bizarre that people bother to make up those fairy-tales when the truth is so much worse. Gates has an absolute ideological commitment to the idea that profit-based production is the most efficient way to produce and allocate goods.

https://pluralistic.net/2021/04/13/public-interest-pharma/#gates-foundation

It’s what prompted him to declare war on free/open software, what caused his foundation to block patent waivers for AIDS drugs in sub-Saharan Africa and other poor nations, and it’s what led him to strong-arm the Oxford university team to kill its plan to release its vaccine into the public domain, opting instead to license it to Astrazeneca.

Gates’s foundation is the key force in fighting against covid vaccine copyright and patent waivers at the WTO, insisting that the world’s poorest billions should rely on charitable donations from rich countries, waiting for vaccines until the wealthy minority are vaxed, boosted, and boosted again.

This is a catastrophic, even genocidal idea. Gates’s ideology denied the world’s poorest access to AIDS drugs, directly leading to a vast population of permanently immunocompromised people in the global south. These same people are especially vulnerable to covid, but again Gates’s ideology denies them vaccines. Worse: immunocompromised people take longer to recover from covid, meaning they have a higher chance of incubating new strains, and when those new strains emerge, they rip through immunocompromised, unvaccinated populations.

Just in case you’ve encountered the racist lie that poor brown people in the global south are too primitive to make their own vaccines, waivers or no, here’s a debunking of that particular pile of bigoted garbage:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/04/27/bruno-argento/#pharma-death-cult

Long before billionaires were threatening to kill us all by making vaccine access subservient to their ideology, they had devoted themselves to the destruction of the public education system. Dilletantes like Betsy DeVos, the Walton family, and, yes, Gates, funneled tens of millions into propaganda for the unaccountable charter school system:

https://www.theguardian.com/education/2018/apr/12/teacher-strikes-rightwing-secret-strategy-revealed

Despite the fact that charters produce worse outcomes at higher prices and create and reinforce racial segregation, they serve an important role in billionaire ideology, by demonizing and neutering teachers’ unions and attacking the idea of public service provision itself. Of course, it’s not all ideology: charter schools make excellent money-laundries:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/07/26/aggregate-demand/#ed-bezzle

As I’ve written, it’s not just that every billionaire is a policy failure: every billionaire is a factory for producing policy failures at scale:

https://onezero.medium.com/rubber-hoses-fd685385dcd4

Of course, billionaires still exist, and they have a lot of money (and hence power), which means that their lickspittles in the economics trade have dreamt up all kinds of excuses for their existence. On his blog, Charlie Stross analyzes these excuses and their counterarguments:

https://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2022/05/the-impotence-of-the-long-dist.html

“Capitalist apologetics” makes an argument that billionaires provide social utility, first, by motivating others through appeals to their greed: “If you strive and strive, you might someday become a billionaire and wield power, too.”

As Stross notes, even by its own lights, this is a pretty flimsy argument. Greed is a powerful motivator, but it also has diminishing returns. Billionaires are so rich that additional fortunes — even vast ones — change very little for them. Once you’re a billionaire, another million (or billion) dollars confers virtually no benefit to you.

Stross cites Steve Jobs, a very powerful billionaire whose riches did not help him after he had his cancerous pancreas removed and his liver began to fail. His money let him keep a bizjet on 24/7 standby so he could be on liver-donor waiting lists in three states — the three states he could reach in time to receive a donor liver before it spoiled. If you’d given Jobs an extra billion dollars, it wouldn’t have made a difference to his ability to procure a liver — the physics of civilian aviation and the frontiers of bioscience put a hard limit on his access to donor livers.

“Personal wealth,” says Stross, “has an upper bound beyond which the numbers are meaningless.”

But there’s another argument for billionaires: they can mobilize their money to change the world (in Jobsean parlance, “make a dent in the universe”). Gates can create a foundation to eradicate child poverty, Musk can use his fortune to establish a Mars colony, etc.

But, Stross says, though billionaires are incredibly rich, they are nowhere near rich enough to do any of this stuff. The world’s total income — the Gross World Product (GWP) — is $70-$100T. Add up all the world’s billionaires’ fortunes and you don’t even get 1% of that. The wealth of a Bezos or Musk doesn’t even cover the 2019 rise in GWP.

For all the lobbying, the corrupting of politicians, the big talk about going to Mars, the “midlife crisis toys like Twitter or weekend getaways on a space station,” billionaires can’t actually do much.

That includes billionaire autocrats like Xi and Putin, who have “nuclear weapons, armies, and populations in 8–9 digits” at their disposal. All of that still won’t deliver Putin the swift victory in Ukraine he planned as a 70th birthday present to himself.

Stross hypothesizes that billionaires “probably feel about as helpless in the face of revolutions, climate change, and economic upheaval as you and I.”

Billionaires may have figured out how to cheat taxes, but they can’t cheat death. Stross says that this produces the cognitive dissonance at the heart of the psychopathology of billionaires: despite being able to command any luxury or necessity for sale, at any price, they can’t insulate themselves from objective reality. Not with all the luxury bunkers in the entire nation of New Zealand.

So: Musk (50) will probably never go to Mars. Even if a Mars colony can be established in a mere 20 years (a fantasy), he will likely not be able to make the journey at 70.

Putin is 70. He’s got thyroid cancer (and, depending on who you believe, lots of other ailments). The only Russian leader in history that lived past 80 was Gorbachev, who only served for six years and largely escaped the premature aging effects of office.

Vast wealth does create enormous power, and that creates tangible outcomes, but it’s easy to get lost in the hype. Musk didn’t found Tesla. SpaceX merely represents a refinement in the long history of reusable spacecraft. Starlink is a reboot of Teledesic.

The most prominent outcomes of billionaire power are all negative: the Kochs may have literally ended human civilization by funding climate denial. Billionaires are unaccountable — that’s why people dream of amassing billions, after all, to escape the petty objections of others — and unaccountable power produces catastrophes.

The fantasy of billionaire wealth is that, with enough money, you can just do what you want. If what you want requires other people, you can just pay them to do their part. If other people don’t want you to have what you want, you can just pay them to go away, or pay someone else to take them away. It’s a toddler’s fantasy of manifesting your will.

The reality is that we live in a society and other people aren’t non-player characters or mere obstacles. Unchecked power can be used for destruction, but it creates very little, besides more destructive power. Left unchecked, that power will destroy the very society that protects it.

[Image ID: The cover of the Penguin edition of Ayn Rand's 'Atlas Shrugged.' The statue of Atlas has been removed. Lying across the full width of the cover is a golden-tinged smashed Roman statue head of an unknown king, his face half-gone and his nose missing.}

#pluralistic

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allthebrazilianpolitics · 1 year

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Brazil appoints first female health minister, a champion of vaccines

Brazil’s President-elect Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva has nominated the country’s first female health minister. Nísia Trindade leads Latin America’s largest health research institution (Fiocruz) and helped produce millions of COVID-19 vaccines during the pandemic. She’ll be tasked with increasing vaccination rates and bringing science back into a health ministry that was virtually discarded by outgoing President Jair Bolsonaro.

Trindade is a sociologist and career researcher at the Oswaldo Cruz Foundation (Fiocruz) in Rio de Janeiro, where she’s been the foundation’s president since 2017. During the pandemic, her team conducted research and she negotiated with the University of Oxford for Fiocruz to produce and distribute the AstraZeneca vaccine, which was applied to millions of Brazilians.

Under Trindade’s administration, Fiocruz became the first institution in Brazil to produce and distribute a vaccine against COVID-19 to the Ministry of Health. Trindade’s performance during the pandemic reportedly caught the attention of Lula’s team, who then invited her to lead the Ministry of Health.

Trindade’s nomination was celebrated by specialists and even by the World Health Organization. On Twitter, the WHO Director General, Tedros Adhanom, congratulated his “friend Nísia” for being the first woman to hold the position in Brazil. “All the best and I look forward to working together in the coming years to advance health for all,” he said.

#brazil #brazilian politics #politics #healthcare #luiz inacio lula da silva #nisia trindade #mod nise da silveira #image description in alt

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cheerstotheelites-if · 2 years

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Are you feelng better after doing the vaccine?

If not,I wish you speedy recovery😊

If yes: Which of the ROs would agree to do a covid vaccine? What type of covid vaccine would they make if they could choose?

Besides the body ache, head ache, and feeling a tad bit feverish, I'm doing okay so far! Just disliking the fact that I have the urge to throw up for some reason. Been taking it slow with answering asks for a while as I recover. 😷😷😷

Take your vaccines, ya'll. Don't want you suffering from covid and infecting loved ones.

I'm sure all of the RO's would agree to doing the vaccine and getting booster shots, especially Fleur because *wildly gestures to her shitty lung sickness*

Weylyn & Zephyrine: Oxford - AstraZeneca

Fleur & Cooper: Pfizer BioNTech

Eliseo: Johnson's & Johnson's - Janssen

Ophelia: Gamaleya Sputnik V

#RO ask #curious anon #Weylyn #Fleur #Zephyrine #Eliseo #Cooper #Ophelia

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metuatqeg · 2 years

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Toronto senior diagnosed with rare disorder after COVID vaccine last summer still waiting for compensation

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deblala · 2 months

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Developers of 'Oxford-AstraZeneca Vaccine' tied to UK Eugenics Movement

https://www.bibliotecapleyades.net/salud/salud_vacunas245.htm

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decentralvaccine · 4 months

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Oxford Begins Human Testing On Brain Swelling Nipah Virus Vaccine

The University of Oxford said on Thursday it had begun human testing of an experimental vaccine against the brain-swelling Nipah virus that led to outbreaks in India's Kerala state and other parts of Asia.

There is no vaccine yet for the deadly virus. Nipah was first identified about 25 years ago in Malaysia and has led to outbreaks in Bangladesh, India and Singapore.

The first participants in the Oxford trial received doses of the vaccine over the last week. The shot is based on the same technology as the one used in AstraZeneca (AZN.L) and Serum Institute of India's COVID-19 shots.

https://www.reuters.com/business/healthcare-pharmaceuticals/oxford-starts-human-testing-nipah-virus-vaccine-2024-01-11/

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andronetalks · 4 months

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Vaccine Victims Say They Are Being Censored by Social Media Sites

The Daily Sceptic BY RICHARD ELDRED 8 JANUARY 2024 7:00 AM People dealing with life-changing injuries from the Oxford-AstraZeneca Covid jab say they’re being silenced on social media when they try to talk about their symptoms. The Mail has the story. They believe they are vaccine victims who suffered a number of severe reactions, including a father-of-two who formed a blood clot after being given…

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#Alternative #COVID #Crime #Disclosure #Health #News #Social Media #Vaccines #World

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bigyoks · 6 months

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And here they come.... to all you vaxx lovers, go to hell.

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airasilver · 6 months

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‘We were told the vaccine was safe - but what happened has been life-changing’

Robert Mendick

Wed, November 8, 2023 at 12:00 PM EST·10 min read

Kate Scott was called by the hospital three times to say goodbye to her husband. Three times she dashed to his bedside expecting him to die at any moment. Three times she thought she would be widowed, leaving her to bring up their two young children, the youngest just a baby at the time, on her own and without the “love of her life”.

But her husband Jamie was nothing if not a fighter. He pulled through and survived the “catastrophic” bleed on his brain. He is not, however, the same man. He can no longer hold down the job he had; can no longer follow complex conversations; his sight is impaired and the simplest things – such as reading a book – are no longer quite so simple.

“We are the luckiest of unlucky people,” says Kate. “We have both gratitude and sorrow. We are grieving for what we have lost but I am so grateful that each morning I can wake up next to him.”

Jamie can recall nothing of the four weeks and five days he remained in a coma in intensive care. “I don’t remember any of it. I don’t remember any of that time. The only thing I can remember is waking up and seeing Kate,” said Jamie.

He is now a test case; the first person to lodge a claim for damages against AstraZeneca in a landmark legal action that – should he win – could pave the way for hundreds of claims and damages that will run into the tens, if not hundreds, of millions.

Jamie was 44, fit and healthy and a keen 10km runner, when his life (and by extension Kate’s and their boys’) was turned upside down. A little over two years ago – on April 23 2021 – Jamie did what so many other Britons did. He went to his local GP clinic in the West Midlands, where the family live, for a Covid jab. It was in the relatively early days of the vaccine rollout and the UK was pushing hard the AstraZeneca vaccine developed at Oxford University.

There had been warnings starting to emerge of possible blood clots associated with the vaccine – two weeks before Jamie had the jab, the UK had stopped giving the AstraZeneca vaccine to the under-30s. But Jamie had wanted to do his bit and get vaccinated so he and the children could visit his elderly father. He wasn’t having the jab for himself. For a man his age and in excellent health, Covid-19 posed little threat. The AstraZeneca vaccine proved to be near fatal.

“We weren’t worried about ourselves,” says Kate, “We were fit and healthy. We don’t smoke, we don’t really drink.”

Jamie is sanguine. “I was just doing what the Government was telling us,” he says.

When he went for the first jab, Jamie had asked for Pfizer; he had been aware vaguely of the possible risk of the Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccine. But there was no Pfizer available. The Government had bought millions of doses from AstraZeneca.

For 10 days after the first dose, Jamie was fine. He went home and went about his normal life. Then, on the morning of May 3, his – and the family’s – life fell apart. Kate recalls what happened next. Jamie complained of tiredness and Kate let him sleep in, taking the boys downstairs for breakfast. “An hour later, he vomited,” recalls Kate. The noise of his retching was unlike anything she had ever heard. “It sounded different. I came upstairs to check on him. At this point his speech was impaired. I thought he was having a stroke. He just wasn’t speaking a language and he didn’t know where he was or who I was.”

His condition continued to deteriorate. Despite the Covid restrictions in place at the time, Jamie’s father was summoned to his bedside along with Kate, who was keeping vigil. “By this time he was non-communicative and didn’t know who I was,” says Kate.

The situation was now desperate. Coventry hospital summoned an air ambulance to get Jamie to Birmingham for an emergency operation at the one hospital in the region with the expertise to carry it out. But a storm prevented the helicopter from flying and Jamie was rushed there by road instead. Queen Elizabeth Hospital in Birmingham was the third hospital to treat Jamie in the course of just one day. Doctors there would keep him alive.

Jamie was in surgery for three hours for what was a catastrophic bleed on the brain. An MRI scan showed the damage to an area of the brain 97mm by 47mm, almost four inches by almost two inches. It is equivalent to about the area of a credit card. That now is dead tissue, says Kate.

“The reason this was so complicated to treat and the reason Jamie is lucky to be alive is this had never happened before. It [VITT] didn’t exist.” It is why she knows the vaccine was responsible for Jamie’s near death; why it was the cause of the bleed on the brain. The vaccine had caused both a massive clot at the entrance to the brain and a bleed on the inside. Treating the clot risked worsening the bleed, says Kate.

Jamie underwent a craniotomy, removing part of his skull to reduce the swelling. For the next four weeks and five days he was in a coma on a ventilator and with a tracheotomy put in his throat. Through the whole terrifying time, Kate was largely refused permission to see her husband because of strict Covid regulations inside the intensive care unit. Their children, at the time aged four and eight months, did not see their father for four months. Only the previous month, Downing Street staffers had been enjoying illegal parties inside the seat of power, including one on the eve of the Duke of Edinburgh’s funeral.

Kate saw her husband when the hospital was fairly sure he was dying. “Three times I was called in to say goodbye; three times I was called in because they thought he wasn’t going to make it,” says Kate. “But the boys didn’t see him for 122 days. For them their dad just disappeared. He couldn’t communicate and he couldn’t Facetime. He was just gone. That was so hard.”

Kate was persistent and in the end negotiated with the hospital authorities that she could visit Jamie for an hour each week. “I was luckier than others,” she says with an optimism born out of extreme hardship. “Jamie is a medical miracle. If you see the damage on the MRI scan you can understand that.”

Kate admits it is both “hard” and “sad” to talk about what happened to Jamie. She does a lot of talking for him. “I still get goosebumps. He was my perfect partner, he was the perfect date. The hardest thing for Jamie now is he is not able to be that same dad and husband. We have two boys who are energetic. They love playing football and climbing trees and Jamie can’t do that anymore. He remembers that he could. He has that constant internal battle with himself, knowing what life was like before and knowing his limitations and understanding he can’t do anything about that because of the size of the bleed.”

Jamie had been super-fit, “not an ounce of fat on him”, and to the outside world looks well enough. Kate wonders if it would be better if he needed a stick to walk, something to telegraph to the public at large that her husband is not very well at all. He is on medication, has undergone 240 hours of rehab, and his concentration is shot to pieces. Jamie doesn’t even have the confidence to ride a bike. He has had to stop driving and has given up a lucrative job developing IT software.

He tells his wife he is “inadequate”. He says: “I will never be able to do my old job. I am struggling with the number of people on this call now,” a reference to the Zoom call we are on. “I can hear what people are talking about but it all becomes a blur. I am still not sure I will get better. It’s been two years.”

Kate says: “The high-functioning area of his brain is damaged. He has blindness.”

It has taken two years of therapy for Kate to talk about what has happened to them. But she is angry and has reluctantly stuck her head above the parapet to highlight the terrible toll wreaked on families by the Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccine. They – like other families – have also had to battle the Government’s hopelessly antiquated and inadequate compensation scheme, which currently limits them to a £120,000 payout. This doesn’t even come close to compensating them for lost future earnings, let alone the damage and distress that has ripped the Scotts apart.

The award is paid out in fatal cases and where victims suffer a “severe disablement”, which is assessed as at least 60 per cent disabled. On first acquaintance, Jamie seems fine, but the reality is his life has changed irreparably.

“We are private people but we cannot stand the injustice of it,” explains Kate. “We have been lobbying the Government for 18 months for fair compensation for the injury caused by the vaccine. AstraZeneca have never even spoken to us, never apologised. It is unethical. It was wrong. No organisation should be above the law but the cost of putting right the injustice is too much. We were told by the Government the vaccine was safe and effective but what’s happened to Jamie has been life changing and their vaccine caused that.”

The tragedy (or near tragedy) has left Kate and Jamie confused and unsure about vaccines. They are not anti-vaxx but they are, and it’s not difficult to comprehend, sceptical. “I’ve been trying to think of an analogy. If we had a severe nut allergy you wouldn’t call me anti-peanuts. We are definitely vaccine-hesitant now.

“These reactions were much more frequent than they led us to believe,” she said. “It is quite low but it makes me angry. They knew the vaccine didn’t stop transmission. We met the neurosurgeon who saved Jamie’s life. Jamie survived but we learned that others didn’t, in the same week. He was the miracle. We are the luckiest unluckiest people. We are so grateful but it is tinged with so much sorrow. Our lives are so much different.

“I have now met the people in parallel lives widowed by this. That is what the future could have looked like.”

I’m surprised that Yahoo has this on their website….now I wonder when others will be shown?

#world #britian #united kingdom #vaccines

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olko71 · 8 months

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New Post has been published on All about business online

New Post has been published on https://yaroreviews.info/2023/08/big-firm-bosses-pay-rose-16-as-workers-squeezed

Big firm bosses' pay rose 16% as workers squeezed

Getty Images

By Michael Race

Business reporter, BBC News

Bosses at Britain’s biggest companies saw their pay rise by almost 16% on average last year as most workers’ wages were squeezed by rising prices.

The High Pay Centre said the median pay of a FTSE 100 chief executive was £3.91m in 2022, up from £3.38m in 2021.

And it said the average earnings of a FTSE 100 boss was 118 times more than a typical UK worker on £33,000 a year.

Critics called the earnings extreme, but some of the firms argued they were in line with competitors.

According to the High Pay Centre’s research, the highest paid chief executive last year was Sir Pascal Soriot, the boss of the drugs giant AstraZeneca, with £15.3m. The British-Swedish company became a household name when it teamed up with Oxford University scientists to develop a Covid-19 vaccine.

Charles Woodburn of security and aerospace firm BAE Systems was the second highest earner with £10.7m, while Emma Walmsley, boss of GlaxoSmithKline, was the highest female earner with £8.45m.

Ben van Beurden, the former boss of energy giant Shell with £9.7m, and BP’s Bernard Looney securing £10.03m featured in the top six biggest earners after both firms reported record profits on soaring energy prices.

The think tank, which analysed the pay of chief executives of all companies on the UK’s blue chip company index through firms’ annual reports for 2022, reported median pay was more than £500,000 up on 2021, continuing its upward trend since it dropped to £2.46m in 2020 during the height of the pandemic.

The High Pay Centre said the rise was in part due to the economic recovery following lockdowns and through bosses having “strong incentive pay awards tied to profitability and share prices”.

However, earnings are still not as high as they were in 2017 when they hit £3.97m.

The independent group, which focuses on economic inequality and fairer pay, said the gap between company executives and other workers’ pay had widened further last year.

‘Extreme’

The Trades Union Congress (TUC) said the report showed Britain was a “land of grotesque extremes”.

“We need an economy that delivers better living standards for all – not just those at the top,” said Paul Nowak, general secretary of the TUC.

But economic think tank the Adam Smith Institute said “knee-jerk attacks” on chief executive pay were unhelpful, and said more attention needed to be applied to the benefits for the wider economy.

In response to the report, AstraZeneca said 12% of Sir Pascal’s pay was fixed, while 88% of it was subject to share price and performance. The firm’s share price has soared 81% in the past five years.

The company also pointed out that on a global basis, its chief executive pay was below big pharmaceutical competitors.

Reuters

BP, Shell and other energy firms have faced criticism over the extent of their profits at a time when high energy prices have been a big driver in the cost of living rising.

Shell told the BBC the £9.7m figure was Mr van Beurden’s “single figure remuneration”, which included a £1.42m salary, £2.59m bonus, Long Term Incentive Payment worth £4.9m, plus pension and other taxable benefits.

A spokesperson said its “executive remuneration” was “benchmarked against a broad range of European multinational companies”, adding that data from the past 10 years showed its senior leaders were “paid competitively”.

Although a single figure is disclosed as the pay package of a chief executive, it typically consists more than just a base salary, with bonuses, incentives and pension pay also included.

Base salary represents only 21% of total FTSE 100 bosses’ remuneration on average, the High Pay Centre said – a direct contrast to most UK workers.

Outside of the biggest firms, workers’ wages on average have failed keep up with rising prices, especially for gas, electricity and food during last year and this year so far.

Inflation, which is the rate consumer prices rise at, is currently at 6.8% in the year to July. However, the figure was much higher throughout the majority of 2022, peaking at 11.1% last October, meaning back then goods on average were more than 10% more expensive compared to prices the year before.

Latest figures from the Office for National Statistics (ONS) show regular pay growth, which excludes bonuses, reached 7.8% over the three months to June compared to a year earlier, but actually dropped by 0.6% once inflation was taken into account.

The governor of the Bank of England Andrew Bailey told the BBC last year that workers should not ask for big pay rises to try to stop prices rising out of control, comments which resulted in backlash from unions and the government’s distancing itself from the stance.

Luke Hildyard, director at the High Pay Centre, said “at a time when so many households are struggling with living costs, an economic model that prioritises a half-a-million-pound pay rise for executives who are already multi-millionaires is surely going wrong somewhere”.

The think tank called for a requirement for companies to include a minimum of two elected workforce representatives on the remuneration committees that set pay.

‘Less criticism, more thought’

Gary Smith, general secretary of the GMB union, said if the government “genuinely think high wages are going to cause spiralling inflation, they probably need to think about curbing pay at the top of the tree, rather than everyone else”.

“While workers in sectors across the board were forced onto picket lines to make ends meet, these top brass were trousering fortunes,” he added.

But Duncan Simpson, executive director at the Adam Smith Institute economic think tank, argued that the pay of chief executives was “all too often” criticised “without further thought”.

“16% is a marked increase. But company leaders provide value to customers with the products and services they sell, to pensioners with dividends from profits they generate and to HMRC through tax receipts,” he said.

“Knee-jerk attacks remain an unhelpful way to look at the private sector which employs over 80% of workers in the UK and generates benefits across society.”

The BBC also contacted BAE systems, GlaxoSmithKline, and BP for comment in relation to the pay packets of chief executives.

The Treasury declined to comment on the report.