HHS fills key vaccine advisory panel slots

The Department of Health and Human Services announced Thursday that it is filling eight vacancies, including the chairmanship, on an important advisory panel on vaccine policy that was down to less than half of its normal roster for months.

It’s still not clear why so many positions were left unfilled on the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices. STAT reported on the vacancies, which had flummoxed public health experts in the country, last week.

A senior HHS official, who asked not to be named, also indicated that the size of the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices will be expanded by one, taking the committee to 16 voting members.

Helen Keipp Bredenberg Talbot, an infectious diseases researcher at Vanderbilt University, will be reappointed to the committee and serve as chair, the official said. Talbot served as a member of ACIP for five years, with her term ending late last year.

The committee, which advises the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention on how vaccines should be used in this country, saw its membership dwindle because HHS had not appointed replacements for seven members whose terms expired in 2023, and had not replaced one member, Nirav Shah, who resigned from the committee after he was named principal deputy director of the CDC. The terms of four of the remaining seven members expire at the end of June.

Until the new appointments were approved, the ACIP faced the rare possibility that six government officials who serve as ex officio members of the panel would have to be sworn in as temporary voting members so that the committee’s scheduled February meeting could take place. But with these new appointments, the committee will have a quorum and that step will not be needed, the official said.

The other members HHS intends to appoint to the committee are: Edwin Asturias, a pediatric infectious diseases specialist at the Colorado School of Public Health; Noel Brewer, a professor of health behavior at the University of North Carolina; Denise Jamieson, dean of the University of Iowa Carver College of Medicine; Helen Chu, an infectious diseases specialist at the University of Washington; Yvonne (Bonnie) Maldonado, a professor of pediatrics at Stanford University; George Kuchel, a professor of geriatric medicine at the University of Connecticut; Robert Schechter, a medical officer with California Department of Public Health; and Albert Shaw, an infectious diseases professor at the Yale School of Medicine. They will serve four-year terms.