Only 35 of the more than 70,000 people who attended Garth Brooks’ concert in Kansas City on Saturday took advantage of a chance to get a COVID-19 vaccine, the Kansas City Health Department said. The mobile vaccination clinic operated for four hours in the Arrowhead parking lot before the concert, and fans were offered a chance to get upgraded floor seats to the concert if they were vaccinated.
Brooks, who has said he is fully vaccinated, had encouraged his fans to get the shot. Maggie Green, a spokeswoman for the Kansas City manager’s office, said the 35 people vaccinated Saturday were in addition to 333 vaccinations the health department administered at events and clinics last week, KCUR reported. She said the health department will continue to partner with community events to increase vaccinations, including at the upcoming Planet Comicon Kansas City, scheduled for Aug. 20-22. At press time it was unknown how many of the Brooks fans at the KC show were already vaccinated before attending; Missouri’s overall vaccination rate is just north of 42%.
Last week, Brooks announced that he planned to re-assess whether his stadium tour should continue given the dramatic resurgence of COVID-19 due to the highly transmissible Delta variant. His show on August 14 at Memorial Stadium in Lincoln, Nebraska is slated to go on as planned with more than 86,000 tickets sold for that date, but tickets for a Sept. 4 gig at Seattle’s Lumen Field have been put on hold.
“It breaks my heart to see city after city go on sale and then have to ask those sweet people and the venues to reschedule,” Brooks said in a statement. “We have a three-week window coming up where we, as a group, will assess the remainder of the stadium tour this year. It’s humbling to see people put this much faith in you as an artist, and it kills me to think I am letting them down.”
