WASHINGTON, June 14 -- The body that has set America's vaccine recommendations since 1964 is now the subject of a slow-motion standoff between a health secretary determined to remake it and a federal court that has ruled he did so illegally. Robert F. Kennedy Jr. fired the government's independent vaccine advisers, installed his own, and slashed the list of shots recommended for children. A judge froze that work as unlawful. Kennedy's response was not to comply but to rewrite the rules of the panel itself, appeal the ruling, and set the reconstituted committee to meet again this month. The losers, for now, are the parents and pediatricians who no longer know which vaccines officially count as recommended.

The dispute is not a technicalit...