UNLV’s School of Public Health has launched NVax, Nevada’s Immunization Coalition, a new statewide effort aimed at raising vaccination rates and confronting the problems that have kept the state near the bottom nationally. The coalition will hold its first community meeting at 9 a.m. on Thursday, April 23, and the event is free and open to the public.
NVax is designed to bring together patients, parents, providers and partner organizations while focusing on public education, clinical guidance for healthcare providers, data review, community events and science-based policy advocacy. Brian Labus, who founded the coalition with roughly $123,000 from the Nevada Division of Public and Behavioral Health, said Nevada has a long record of ending up near the bottom on health measures. “It’s not a secret that Nevada regularly finds its way to the bottom of good lists and the top of bad lists when it comes to health, education, access to healthcare, and immunization rates,” he said.
The numbers help explain why the launch matters now. Nevada children have some of the lowest rates of on-time immunization in the country, including a ranking of 40th out of 50 states for childhood inoculations against pertussis, 36th for the hepatitis B birth dose and 42nd for babies who receive the full three-dose hepatitis B series by age 6 months. During the 2024-25 school year, roughly 7% of Nevada kindergartners were unvaccinated, and the state was tied with North Dakota and South Dakota for the fourth-worst exemption rate. Adults fare badly too: just 31% of Nevada residents age 18 and up received influenza vaccination, third worst in the nation behind Idaho and Michigan, and about 13% of adults got a COVID-19 booster in the last year.
The coalition was created to answer a problem that has not gone away after the pandemic exposed how low Nevada’s vaccination levels already were. During the COVID-19 pandemic, the state ranked in the lowest third nationally for vaccination, and Labus said misinformation is the biggest threat to building community immunity. The work ahead is straightforward and difficult at the same time: persuade more Nevadans to get immunizations, give providers better tools to answer questions, and make sure people who cannot be vaccinated are still protected by the community around them. That is the test NVax is setting for itself, starting with Thursday morning’s meeting.
