text_1: Panel recommends pneumonia vaccine for adult smokers
text_2: "The NY Daily News took a 750-word Associated Press story and chopped it down to 230 words. It lost much of the important meat in this cut – all to save 500 words. Our comments target this butchered Daily News version. The Daily News version cut out these important elements of the original AP story:   cost and cost-effectiveness questions; concerns that the new vaccinations may be considered overtreatment in otherwise healthy younger smokers; the only interview with an independent source; any discussion of the inefficacy of the vaccine in younger people or of the fact that there is no booster available, even though protection drops off after 5-10 years. The chief deficiencies of either version of the article are that the reader is left without a sense of how effective the vaccine might be in the newly-targeted populations. The article could have been improved with an attempt at quantification of benefits or numbers needed to vaccinate as well as with richer interviews of more disinterested experts who could have filled in these areas. Some vague areas in the article are misleading: the vaccine does not in the best of circumstances prevent lung infection; pneumococcal infection is not synonymous with ""pneumonia;""  the vaccine may have no ""booster"" but revaccination is a common practice; and not all smokers are alike, making it unlikely that the CDC would recommend the vaccination indiscriminately. After reading the article, the reader should be left wondering what the health benefit might be of this strategy, but fairly confident that more vaccine will be sold and administered. And readers of the shortened NY Daily News article  got even less. If 230 words is all you can invest in a story like this, you might as well give up the space to the comics section or Sudoku."