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.