NFL provides Biden soccer stadiums for Covid vaccination websites

Sofi Stadium, home of the Los Angeles Rams in Inglewood, California.

Keith Birmingham | MediaNews Group | Getty Images

The National Football League announced President Joe Biden that it is making all 30 stadiums available to the general public as mass coronavirus vaccination sites.

Seven NFL teams are already running vaccinations against Covid-19 in or near their stadiums.

“The NFL and our 32 member clubs are committed to doing our part to ensure that vaccines are as widely available in our communities as possible,” League commissioner Roger Goodell wrote in a letter to Biden on Thursday.

“We can expand our efforts to stadiums more effectively as many of our clubs have been offering their facilities as COVID test centers and polling stations in recent months,” Goodell wrote.

His letter stated that each NFL team would coordinate vaccination efforts at the stadiums, two of which are shared by two teams, with local, state and federal health officials.

It already happened in San Francisco, where the 49ers team and Santa Clara County announced on Friday that Levi’s Stadium would be used as a vaccination site for residents next week.

The team said the stadium will be California’s largest vaccination site with an initial capacity of 5,000 people receiving shots per day and plans to increase that capacity to 15,000 people per day if vaccine supplies increase.

Goodell noted that the NFL will host 7,500 vaccinated health care workers from around the country for Sunday’s Super Bowl game between the Kansas City Chiefs and the Tampa Bay Buccaneers.

The commissioner said workers were invited “out of gratitude for their heroic service and to highlight the importance of vaccinations as our country recovers from the pandemic”.

The NFL referred questions to the White House when 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 variety of professional baseball stadiums in the US are already offering Covid vaccines to the public.

A temporary mass vaccination site opened on Friday at Yankee Stadium in the Bronx, New York.

Another location in the Mets house in Citi Field, Queens, should have recordings in late January. However, this opening was postponed as the city lacked sufficient vaccines.

Los Angeles turned Dodger Stadium into a mass vaccination site in January after serving as a mass covid testing site for eight months.

– CNBC’s Noah Higgins-Dunn contributed to this report.

Correction: The NFL has 30 stadiums. In a previous version the number was incorrectly specified.