Shaker Heights native wins first $1 million Ohio vaccine lottery drawing

(The Ohio Channel)

By Collin Cunningham

(SHAKER HEIGHTS, Ohio) The Ohio lottery announced on Wednesday evening that Shaker Heights native and high school graduate Abbigail Bugenske has won the first of five $1 million prizes in the state's Vax-A-Million lottery, a measure designed to encourage Ohioans to get the COVID-19 vaccine.

It was the Moderna shot that helped the 22-year-old Bugenske, who has since emigrated from Shaker to the Cincinnati area, win the prize, according to Cleveland.com. She told the site that she registered on the Vax-A-Million webpage but didn't even know when the winners would be announced until she received a phone call from Gov. Mike DeWine.

“I was screaming enough that my parents thought that I was crying and that something was wrong,” Bugenske told reporters during a Thursday morning news conference, which can be viewed below. “And when I started yelling that I won $1 million and I was going to be a millionaire, they told me to calm down and make sure it wasn’t a prank before I really started freaking out. So they grounded me a bit.”

She added that she has no plans to quit her current job at General Electric Aviation after winning and will most likely invest the majority of it and donate some to charity. Bugenske is currently working towards her master's degree in aerospace engineering.

The Michigan State University graduate was joined at the address by 14-year-old Joseph Costello, an Englewood, Ohio resident who now has plenty of college options after winning the first of five full-ride scholarships to any of Ohio's state universities through a separate drawing, per News 5 Cleveland.

“Yeah, still not processing it that well," the winning student told the station, adding that his current choices include The Ohio State University, University of Dayton and Miami University in Oxford, Ohio.

Having just finished eighth grade this month, Costello said he's still deciding what he wants to study.

“It was the governor on the line and at first I didn’t think it was really,” said Costello's mother, Colleen, who fielded the call from DeWine.

Both raffles are drawn simultaneously, but the money prize is only available to vaccinated residents over the age of 18 and the scholarship is only open to vaccinated youths aged 12 to 17. Bugenske told News 5 that she felt the lottery tactic was working and more people have been getting vaccinated because of it.

“Calling someone and telling them that they won a million dollars is a great thing," DeWine said at the news briefing, per WLWT.

As of Monday, DeWine said more than 2.7 million Ohioans and 104,000 of the state's children have signed up for their chance to receive the respective $1 million and full tuition prizes. The winners for each of the four remaining prizes will be announced on June 2, 9, 16 and 23.

That's only if the new legislature aimed at ending the vaccine raffle doesn't succeed first, of course. During a press conference on Monday, DeWine stated that he would push back against a bill that Miami County Rep. Jena Powell is expected to introduce shortly in an attempt to dispel the lottery.

Powell is of the opinion that the lottery is a waste of state taxpayer resources and that the money should instead be contributed to small business funds or be donated to children's mental and physical health services.

Follow me to see more articles like this.

...

Follow