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What you need to know about eligibility requirements for the NC vaccine lottery

There are three more opportunities for a chance to win one million dollars.

RALEIGH, N.C. — The winners of the state's second vaccination lottery drawing will be pulled on Wednesday.

You'll remember the first million-dollar winner is from Winston-Salem. Shelly Wyramon is a tutor and mother of three. 

The first winner of the college scholarship money is from Wilmington. There are three more opportunities for a chance to win one million dollars. 

One major takeaway you need to know is who is eligible to win which prize? Anyone 18 or older who has received a first dose of the COVID-19 vaccine is eligible to win one million dollars.

For those who have a first dose shot and are between the ages of 12 and 17, you are eligible to win a $125,000 scholarship for college.

If you received your first vaccine before June 10, you will be entered one time into the vaccination lottery. For those of you who were vaccinated on or after June 10, you will be entered into the lottery twice. 

To be eligible for the drawing, the state must have received and accepted your vaccination and contact information before 11:59 pm this past Sunday. 

It's important to note that you have to receive your shot at a vaccination site in North Carolina and you have to be a state resident to have any chance of winning. News 2 spoke with a representative with the North Carolina Department of Health and Human Services who's hoping people take advantage of the opportunity.

"We know there's a lot more that needs to be done. And we're particularly worried about making sure that people get vaccinated because we have variants that are rising that are very dangerous and a lot more transmissible than previous variants of COVID-19," said Senior Policy and Intergovernmental Affairs Advisor Hattie Gawande.

To know whether NCDHHS has your information to contact you if you're a winner we have you covered. Click here, where we explain how to check if the state has your information and what you need to do if you need to update your contact information with the state health department. 

As you may know, the vaccination lottery is an incentive for more people to get COVID-19 vaccines. But, according to the state's vaccination rates, we have not seen a significant increase. 

The state health department says before the first vaccine lottery announcement on June 10 vaccinations were declining rapidly. After the announcement was made, they say the decline is flattening out.  

The state anticipates to fully see the impacts of the drawings when all the drawings have been made. 

"It takes some time for the data to catch up. So, providers take a little while to enter data into our system. Most of it, if they vaccinate someone on a given day they enter the data within 72 hours, but we definitely know it takes some folks longer," said Gawande. 

As of now, 43 percent of our total population is fully vaccinated. Just over half of people ages 12 and up have at least one dose.

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