Sofi Stadium, home of the Los Angeles Rams in Inglewood, California.
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The National Football League announced President Joe Biden that it is making all 32 football stadiums available to the general public as mass coronavirus vaccination sites.
There are currently seven NFL teams running 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 in our communities,” wrote NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell 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 national soccer team would coordinate vaccination efforts in the stadiums with local, state and federal health authorities.
This already happened in San Francisco, where the 49ers team and Santa Clara County announced on Friday that Levi’s Stadium would be used to vaccinate residents from 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 as vaccine supplies increase.
Goodell noted that Sunday’s Super Bowl game between the Kansas City Chiefs and the Tampa Bay Buccaneers will host 7,500 vaccinated health workers from across the country.
The commissioner said these 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 White House had no immediate comment on Goodell’s letter.
The current vaccination sites are hosted by the Arizona Cardinals, Atlanta Falcons, Baltimore Ravens, Carolina Panthers, Houston Texans, Miami Dolphins, and New England Patriots.
The football stadiums would join a variety of professional ballpark stadiums across the country that offer Covid-19 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, the 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 testing site for Covid-19 for eight months.
– CNBC’s Noah Higgins-Dunn contributed to this report