Sofi Stadium, home of the Los Angeles Rams in Inglewood, California.
Keith Birmingham | MediaNews Group | Getty Images
The National Football League has told President Joe Biden that it is making all of its 30 stadiums available as mass vaccination sites against coronavirus to the general public.
Seven NFL teams are already hosting vaccinations for Covid-19 at or near the stadium.
“The NFL and our 32 member clubs are committed to doing our part to ensure that vaccines are as widely available as possible in our communities,” league commissioner Roger Goodell told Biden on Thursday.
“We can expand our efforts to stadiums more efficiently, as many of our clubs have previously offered their facilities as COVID testing centers, as well as polling stations over the past few months,” Goodell wrote.
His letter said each NFL team would coordinate with local, state and federal health officials on stadium vaccination efforts.
This is already happening in San Francisco, where the 49ers team and Santa Clara County announced on Friday that Levi’s Stadium will begin next week 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 shots per day and plans to increase this to 15,000 people each day as vaccine reserves increase. .
Goodell said the NFL will have 7,500 vaccinated health workers nationwide as guests at this 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 vaccinations as our country recovers from the pandemic.”
The NFL sent questions to the White House when it was contacted by CNBC. The Biden administration had no immediate comment.
The league’s current vaccination sites are hosted by the Arizona Cardinals, Atlanta Falcons, Baltimore Ravens, Carolina Panthers, Houston Texans, Miami Dolphins and New England Patriots.
A number of professional baseball stadiums in the United States are already offering Covid vaccines to the public.
On Friday, a temporary mass vaccination site was opened at Yankee Stadium in New York’s Bronx.
Another site at the Mets House in Citi Field, Queens, was scheduled to begin offering photos in late January. But the opening was postponed because the city lacked enough vaccines.
Los Angeles turned Dodger Stadium into a mass vaccination site in January after serving as a mass testing site for Covid for eight months.
– CNBC’s Noah Higgins-Dunn contributed to this report.
Correction: The NFL has 30 stadiums. An earlier version incorrectly indicated the number.