MONTREAL --
A 54-year-old woman has died in the province after receiving the AstraZeneca COVID-19 vaccine, Quebec's public health director Horacio Arruda confirmed Tuesday.
“We just had our first patient who has died of a thrombosis, cerebral thrombosis, following vaccination from AstraZeneca," said Arruda in a news conference. "This is an event that is rare. We knew that it might happen. We have a risk of default one in every 100,000 doses today."
Arruda said it was a risk the province knew it was taking, and that the benefits outweigh the risks.
"It puts a face on a statistic and for us, statistics are always people, and there's no way of knowing who the person is who is going to react that way," he added. "People don't get vaccinated to die. It's rare, and we can't predict it. But for the population at large, vaccination remains beneficial."