OHIO — The second set of Vax-a-Million winners are thinking big about their futures — one wants to go to medical school and the other wants to find their family's forever home.
Gov. Mike DeWine introduced Zoie Vincent of Cuyahoga County, the scholarship winner, and Jonathan Carlyle of Lucas County, the $1 million prize winner, during a press conference Thursday.
For Carlyle, the surprise came at the end of his shift after missing a call by DeWine.
“I just got done with a very, very long shift delivering packages for Amazon and I saw your name on my phone. I had a feeling what was up," Carlyle said. "I listened to the voicemail and pretty much almost lost it inside the van."
Carlyle said he was up all night dreaming of the possibilities for his family. Their youngest just turned 5-months-old Thursday, and Carlyle said the main goal is to find a forever home.
"This is a good foundation for my family. It’s just unbelievable," he said.
Carlyle said he got the Johnson & Johnson vaccine just days after the lottery announcement.
"I was putting it off because I was working all the time. I knew I needed to get it, I wanted to get it," Carlyle said. Now, he said the money will help take a lot of that pressure off of his family.
Vincent, the scholarship winner, said she learned she had won after DeWine called her father Thursday around 7:15 p.m.
“It was just like really wild. It came out of nowhere. We weren’t really expecting it at all. It was just like this super big surprise," Vincent said.
As for her future, Vincent said she's pretty set on the field she wants to go into.
"I’m definitely interested in medicine," she said. "I’ve been looking at pre-med or bio programs. Colleges like Case Western and Ohio State have definitely been on my radar for that."
The Vax-a-Million lottery is an incentive launched last month to increase vaccination rates across the state. So far, DeWine said it's paying off.
“We’re ahead of this virus at this point," DeWine said "It’s like a basketball team or a football team that has a lead — you can’t sit on the lead. You got to continue to score points."
A few months ago, DeWine said one of the state's goals was to have a rate of 50 cases per 100,000 residents. As of Wednesday's state data, the case rate has fallen to 58.3 per 100,000 — a sharp decline from two weeks ago when the rate was 97.1 per 100,000.
More than half of Ohio's counties are below the 50 cases per 100,000 people, DeWine said.
As of Wednesday, more than 45% of Ohio's population has received the first dose, whereas 39.9% of residents are completely vaccinated, according to state data.
Within the first week of the lottery, more than 261,000 first-dose shots were distributed between May 13 to 24, which is an increase from the 160,000 shots the week before, according to state data.
Between May 25 and June 1, more than 60,800 first-doses were distributed.
There are three drawings left for the Vax-a-Million lottery. Individuals can still register for a chance to win one of the next three prizes by clicking here or calling 1-833-4-ASK-ODH (1-833-427-5634).
By the time of the first drawing, 2.7 million people had entered the $1 million lottery, while more than 104,300 juveniles entered for a chance to win a full-ride college scholarship to any Ohio public university. More than 3 million adult residents and more than 132,000 Ohioans ages 12-17 are entered for the second drawing.
Last week, Abbigail Bugenske of Silverton won the first of five $1 million prizes and the first college scholarship winner was Joseph Costello of Englewood.