A Baltimore County resident won $40,000 for getting a coronavirus vaccination in Maryland, the first winner of the state’s $2 million vaccine incentive lottery, the Maryland Lottery announced Tuesday.
A random number assigned to the person by the Maryland Department of Health was drawn Tuesday morning by a random number generator from the lottery.
It’s unclear if the person will be identified, as the health department is going through the process of gaining consent from the winner to share with the lottery, said Carole Bober Gentry, lottery spokeswoman.
“We haven’t gotten there yet,” she said.
However, winners of the collaborative promotion can remain anonymous if they wish, according to the lottery.
This winner is likely from a smaller town in Baltimore County, as the lottery would publish the hometown of a winner who lived in a town with 60,000 or more people, according to the lottery.
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The person had roughly a one in 100,000 chance of taking home the cash, odds that will get worse each day with thousands more vaccine recipients entering the pool, a University of Maryland, Baltimore County statistics professor said.
There will be 39 more daily drawings worth $40,000 leading up to a Fourth of July jackpot worth $400,000.
More than 3.3 million people in Maryland have received at least one vaccine dose, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
The state said it is averaging over 47,000 immunizations daily, though only a share of those immunizations are first doses of the Pfizer/BioNTech and Moderna vaccines or single-shot inoculations from Johnson & Johnson. The vaccine lottery only requires a person to have received one dose to be entered for a chance to win cash.