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 of its 30 stadiums available as massive coronavirus vaccination sites to the general public.
Seven NFL teams are already receiving vaccinations for Covid-19 in or near their stadiums.
“The NFL and our 32 member clubs are committed to ensuring that vaccines are as widely available as possible in our communities,” the league commissioner Roger Goodell wrote in a letter to Biden on Thursday.
“We can expand our efforts more effectively into stadiums as many of our clubs have previously offered their facilities as COVID testing centers and election sites in recent months,” Goodell wrote.
His letter stated that each NFL team would consult with local, state and federal health officials about the vaccination efforts at the stadiums.
That already happened in San Francisco, where the 49ers team and Santa Clara County announced on Friday that Levi’s Stadium would be opened as a vaccination spot for local residents next week.
The team said the stadium will be California’s largest vaccination site, with an initial capacity of 5,000 people receiving injections per day, and plans to increase that to 15,000 people per day as the vaccine supply increases.
Goodell noted that the NFL will have 7,500 vaccinated health workers from around the country as guests at Sunday’s Super Bowl game between the Kansas City Chiefs and the Tampa Bay Buccaneers.
The commissioner said the workers had been invited “in gratitude for their heroic service and to emphasize the importance of vaccinations as our country recovers from the pandemic.”
The NFL referred questions to the White House when CNBC reached out. The Biden administration had no immediate comments.
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 large number of professional baseball stadiums in the United States are also already offering Covid vaccines to the public.
Friday, a temporary mass vaccination site opened at Yankee Stadium in New York City’s Bronx neighborhood.
Another location in Mets’ home at Citi Field in Queens would begin offering shots in late January. But that opening was delayed because the city didn’t have enough vaccines.
Los Angeles turned Dodger Stadium into a massive vaccination site in January after serving as a massive Covid testing site for eight months.
– CNBC’s Noah Higgins-Dunn contributed to this report.
Correction: The NFL has 30 stadiums. An earlier version misrepresented the number.