Sofi Stadium, home of the Los Angeles Rams in Inglewood, California.
Keith Birmingham | MediaNews Group | Getty Images
The National Football League told President Joe Biden that it is making all 30 of its stadiums available as mass vaccination sites against coronavirus for the general public.
Seven NFL teams are already performing vaccinations for Covid-19 at or near their stadiums.
“The NFL and our 32 member clubs are committed to doing our part to ensure that vaccines are widely available in our communities,” wrote league commissioner Roger Goodell in a letter to Biden on Thursday.
“We can expand our stadium efforts more effectively, because many of our clubs have previously offered their facilities as COVID testing centers, as well as hot spots in the past few months,” wrote Goodell.
His letter said that each NFL team would coordinate stadium vaccination efforts with local, state and federal health officials.
This was already happening in San Francisco, where team 49ers and Santa Clara County announced on Friday that Levi’s Stadium would begin next week to be used as a vaccination site for local residents.
The team said the stadium will be the largest vaccination site in California, with an initial capacity of 5,000 people receiving vaccines per day, and plans to increase that number to 15,000 people per day as the vaccine supply increases.
Goodell noted that the NFL will have 7,500 vaccinated health professionals from across the country as guests in Sunday’s Super Bowl game between the Kansas City Chiefs and the Tampa Bay Buccaneers.
The commissioner said the workers were invited “in gratitude for their heroic service and to highlight the importance of vaccination while our country is recovering from the pandemic”.
The NFL referred questions to the White House when contacted by CNBC. The Biden government did not immediately comment.
The league’s current vaccination sites are being hosted by the Arizona Cardinals, Atlanta Falcons, Baltimore Ravens, Carolina Panthers, Houston Texans, Miami Dolphins and New England Patriots.
Several professional baseball stadiums in the United States are also now offering Covid vaccines to the public.
On Friday, a temporary mass vaccination site opened at Yankee Stadium in the Bronx neighborhood of New York.
Another location at the Mets’ home in Citi Field, Queens, was scheduled to start offering injections in late January. But this inauguration was postponed because the city lacked vaccines.
Los Angeles turned Dodger Stadium into a mass vaccination site in January, after serving as a Covid mass test site for eight months.
– CNBC’s Noah Higgins-Dunn contributed to this report.
Correction: The NFL has 30 stadiums. An earlier version missed the number.