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| Late Lisa Stone with her daughter Jordan Stone |
Family and friends say a woman from Edmonton, Alberta has died after receiving the AstraZeneca vaccine in late April.
Tuesday night, the Chief Medical Officer of Health Dr. Deena Hinshaw announced the vaccine-induced death of an Alberta woman in her 50s online.
“My apologies for sharing this sad news so late, but we’d promised to alert Albertans as soon as possible in such confirmed instances,” she said.
Hinshaw and Alberta Health would not confirm the woman's identity, but family and friends say her name was Lisa Stonehouse, a 52-year-old mother from Edmonton.
“She deserved more,” Wilfred Lowenberg said.
Lowenberg told CTV News he’s the godfather to Stonehouse's 19-year-old daughter, Jordan, and was a best friend of her late father, Morrie Stonehouse.
According to him, Lisa received her first shot of AstraZeneca on April 21 and developed an adverse reaction shortly after.
“She was an amazing woman,” Lowenberg said.
“She put everyone first ahead of herself, especially her daughter.
“Probably the best, one of the best mother's I've ever seen.”
This was the second of three confirmed fatal cases of vaccine-induced thrombotic thrombocytopenia (VITT) in Canada and the only death in Alberta linked to AstraZeneca.
The other two cases involved a 54-year-old woman in Quebec in late April and a woman in her 60s in New Brunswick on Wednesday after spending weeks in hospital.
"I guess it's a one in a million thing,” Lowenberg said. “But obviously Lisa was a one in a million person."
"Her daughter didn't deserve this, and neither did her parents.
“Her parents lost their only daughter, and no parent should have to suffer through that, just as no child of Jordan's age should have to lose both her parents before the age of 20."
'SHE GOT THE VACCINE FOR ME'
Jordan Stonehouse says she had big plans for travel with her mother — Mexico, India, Egypt.
"She got the vaccine for me, and her plan was to travel once the borders reopen and we're able to," the 19-year-old says.
"As mother and daughter there has to be boundaries, but I feel like once my father passed and it was just us together, we had each other. . .she became my best friend. We told each other so many things."
Stonehouse says her mother was turned away at the emergency room of Grey Nuns Hospital in Edmonton last Thursday as her symptoms worsened. The next day the otherwise healthy woman suffered a fatal bleed in her brain.
"It's just the not knowing of maybe she'd be around right now with me if they could have helped her," says Lisa's daughter Jordan Stonehouse. "But they didn't."
She says her mom was suffering from fatigue, strong nausea, headache, fever and chills. The symptoms were continuing to get worse a full week after she received her first shot.
Jordan is working on her undergraduate degree in Biology with the goal of becoming a nurse, and says she believes vaccines are still crucial to controlling COVID long term. But she questions whether the AstraZeneca shot should still be in use.
From an emergency public health perspective AstraZeneca makes sense — far more lives will be saved by its use than lost due to rare complications — that calculation does nothing to ease the pain of Jordan's loss.
"That one in a million, that's me," says Jordan. "And its affected me so much and I just really don't want this to happen to another family or anything because it's just so hard."
Source | https://edmonton.ctvnews.ca/
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