The Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) is soliciting nominations for appointment to the National Vaccine Advisory Committee (NVAC), the agency said in a notice published Wednesday.
A renewed NVAC charter filed in July estimates the committee’s annual operating cost at $756,918 and calls for staff support equivalent to two full-time employees. The committee has not met since September 2024. The estimated annual cost for operating the committee in 2019 was $160,000.
Qualified individuals will be nominated by the Assistant Secretary for Health (ASH), who serves as the Director of the National Vaccine Program (NVP), for appointment to the NVAC. Nominations are due within 30 days of the announcement, and individuals may nominate themselves.
The notice states that membership will be “balanced” and include members who are engaged in “gold standard science, vaccine safety or efficacy research, or who are physicians, scientists, members of parent organizations concerned with immunizations, representatives of state or local health agencies or public health organizations.”
Earlier this year, HHS revised the National Vaccine Program’s charter to also explore “non-immunization strategies for individuals who are unable to be vaccinated, or who choose not to be vaccinated due to medical contraindications or strongly held personal, conscientious or religious beliefs.”
Members of the committee serve for overlapping terms of up to four years.
NVAC was established in 1986 under the National Childhood Vaccine Injury Act. The committee advises the Assistant Secretary for Health on the program’s core goals: ensuring an adequate supply of safe and effective vaccines and recommending research priorities to improve vaccine safety and efficacy.
The committee includes 17 voting members, consisting of 15 public members and two industry representatives. HHS currently lists eight voting members on its website.
The NVAC has not met since September 2024. According to the HHS website, the terms of all eight listed voting members have expired, four in December 2025 and the remaining four on February 9, 2026, though the page still lists them as current members.
The HHS filed a renewed charter for the NVAC on July 7, 2026. Under the charter, members may continue serving for up to 180 days after their terms expire while awaiting a successor. That provision could have allowed the four members whose terms ended February 9 to serve through August 8. HHS published its call for nominations on August 12, four days after that maximum holdover period had elapsed. The agency’s website continues to list all eight members as current, and HHS has not said how many vacancies it intends to fill.
The new charter also tells the committee to look beyond immunizations and consider other methods to prevent or limit vaccine-preventable diseases for those who cannot or will not receive vaccines.
Other vaccine advisory boards have faced shakeups under the Trump Administration. In June, 2025, Kennedy dismissed all 17 members of the CDC’s ACIP and replaced them with his own appointees.
The month before, Kennedy announced on X that the CDC would stop recommending the COVID vaccine for healthy children and healthy pregnant women, a decision that bypassed ACIP input entirely.
In January, 2026, Endpoints News reported that at least two members of the Advisory Commission on Childhood Vaccines (ACCV) received messages saying their service was no longer required. The Hill later reported that at least half of ACCV’s eight serving members had been removed before their terms expired.
Filed Under: Immunology
