This paper presents a new hybrid genetic algorithm for the vertex cover problems in which scan-repair and local improvement techniques are used for local optimization. With the hybrid approach, genetic algorithms are used to perform global exploration in a population, while neighborhood search methods are used to perform local exploitation around the chromosomes. The experimental results indicate that hybrid genetic algorithms can obtain solutions of excellent quality to the problem instances with different sizes. The pure genetic algorithms are outperformed by the neighborhood search heuristics procedures combined with genetic algorithms.