Prevnar 13 and Methodology

If you want to be accurate, you can't just cherry pick parts of abstracts.

A rant at Huffington-Post describes how mother nature can always win against vaccine makers:

Smash down an infectious agent and another one, sometimes more dangerous, pops up. In this particular case, the vaccine for pneumonia (Prevnar) only protects against some of the strains that can cause invasive pneumonia in children. And, for a few years, we saw a drop in cases. But, as Mother Nature moves to establish her dominance, we've seen an increase in another subtype of the bacteria. And guess what? 30% of these new cases were multidrug resistant. ...It is truly up to parents to be proactive in raising healthy children. You can NOT rely on your doctor anymore. http://pediatrics.aappublications.org/cgi/content/abstract/125/3/429

The link to the comment is at the bottom of this blog entry.

My response
You can rely on your doctor if the doctor reads that journal. You cannot rely on vaccination opponents who either don't know how to research or don't accurately report what they find.

In 2000, the 7 strain Pneumococcal Conjugate Vaccine (PCV7) was introduced. Has the percentage of various strains of virus infecting children changed since the introduction of PCV7? Yes. There has been an increase in strain 19A cases.

What did this vaccination opponent leave out?

"CONCLUSIONS: Since 2005, the number of invasive pneumococcal infections in children has increased at 8 children's hospitals, primarily as a result of serotype 19A isolates, one third of which were resistant to multiple antibiotics in 2007 and 2008. Continued surveillance is necessary to detect emerging serotypes after the planned introduction of 13-valent or other pneumococcal vaccines.' 

With an intended audience of pediatricians, the abstract assume the reader knows that,

"In a large clinical trial, PCV7 was shown to be 97% effective in preventing invasive disease caused by the pneumococci contained in the vaccine and 89% effective against all types of S. pneumoniae, including those not found in the vaccine." 

Next step, check if strain 19A is included in the 13-valent vaccine. Research starting point: Wikipedia, which states 19A should be iincluded in Prevnar 13. Just to be sure, check the authoritative US site, the FDA, with this google site search,  fda.gova.gov prevnar13 OR "prevnar 13"  I find what I want, read the product insert and find on page 14 that strain 19A is included in Prevnar 13. 

I'm Canadian, so I check the Canadian status. Canada approved Prevnar 13 a few weeks earlier.

This comment illustrates that (1)vaccination opponents don't properly research properly what they report OR don't accurately report what they do research, (2) if you are not part of the intended audience of what you read, it is easy to come to the wrong conclusions, (3) researching vaccine and virus questions is not as simple as scanning abstracts or looking up the toxicity of ingredients in vaccines, (4) this means that somehow or another, you need to pick up the necessary background. A good starting point is Wikipedia.

Here is the original comment followed by responses at Huffington-Post.

Added later:

Here is the result from the abstract
4% of infections were serotypes included in PCV7.
68% are serotypes 1,3,7 and 19A

Guess which serotypes are among those added to PCV7 to make PCV13?
Yup.