Get your AZ vaccination, urges sister of clot victim
THE sister of a man who died of a blood clot after being given the AstraZeneca vaccine says she ‘strongly believes’ people should continue to have the jab.
Pharmacist Dr Alison Astles said her 59-year-old brother Neil died on Sunday after getting the vaccine on March 17.
Hospital clinicians said they were ‘99.9 per cent sure’ the clot was due to the jab.
But Dr Astles urged people to continue getting vaccinated, saying her brother was ‘extraordinarily unlucky’.
‘Despite what has happened to Neil and the impact on our family, I still strongly believe that people should go ahead and have the vaccine,’ she told the BBC. ‘If you’ve had one dose, go ahead and have your second. If you haven’t had your dose yet make sure that you do.
‘Because, overall, we will save more lives by people having the vaccine than not. The risk of a clot is very, very small and my brother was extraordinarily unlucky.’
She described Neil as a ‘much-loved brother, husband and son’. Dr Astles said her brother, a solicitor from Warrington, Cheshire, began to have headaches and nausea a week after the vaccine. He was taken to A&E at Royal Liverpool University Hospital on Friday night and doctors found a ‘huge blood clot’. He died two days later. Dr Astles, who is subject leader for pharmacy at the University of Huddersfield, said: ‘The human being, the sister in me, still feels absolutely furious and very angry that this has happened to my brother.’ She added it was ‘not a statistic or theory for me – that is actually what’s happened to my family’.