Rising Refusals of Injection for Newborns Leave More Babies Dying From Brain Bleeds, Doctors Say

A vitamin that costs pennies, takes seconds to administer, and has been standard practice in American hospitals for 65 years is quietly becoming a front line of the anti-vaccine movement, and newborns are paying with their lives.In 2024, more than 700 newborns died from spontaneous bleeding in their brains. The bleeds could have been complicated by liver disease or prematurity; however, the growing consensus is that those deaths were likely caused by vitamin K deficiency — a condition that a single injection, delivered within the first hours of life, would have almost certainly prevented.A landmark national study of more than 5 million births, published in JAMA, found that the rate of American babies not receiving vitamin K at birth topped 5 percent in 2024 — up 77 percent from 2017.That is nearly a quarter of a million infants born without a protection that, a generation ago, was considered so routine it required no parental decision at all.“The rate has gone up from around 1 or 2 percent to 3 or 4 percent. Still not enormous, but that is a really alarming trend when you look at the pace of that growth,” a pediatrician and American Academy of Pediatrics spokesman, Dr. David Hill, tells The New York Sun.The question facing physicians, public health officials, and parents alike is how a once-unremarkable intervention became a flashpoint, and what it is costing newborns across the country.A shot that saved a generation — now under siegeThe American Academy of Pediatrics first recommended the vitamin K injection for all newborns in 1961, following nearly two decades of research confirming its effectiveness. The shot, administered into the thigh muscle within hours of birth, essentially eliminated vitamin K deficiency bleeding in the United States. Injections are preferred over oral delivery because a newborn’s developing gut cannot readily absorb the vitamin.When a baby is born today, hospital staff move quickly through a standard checklist: measurements, antibiotic eye ointment, and the vitamin K shot. For many parents, it barely registers in the blur of those first hours. Yet, the intervention is among the more consequential in a newborn’s life, reducing the risk of potentially fatal bleeding during the first six months.That picture has been changing. One pediatrician describes what the shift has looked like from inside the delivery room.“For most of my career, this was a vanishingly rare thing to encounter. It would be something I’d mention at dinner: You’ll never believe this, I saw a parent today who refused the newborn vitamin K injection,” Dr. Hill says. “Now it’s common enough that it doesn’t even bear mentioning. It’s common enough now that when I see all of the routine interventions have been done on a newborn, I breathe a sigh of relief.”Researchers and clinicians point to several overlapping reasons why growing numbers of parents are refusing the shot before it can be given. These include misinformation circulating on social media that conflates the injection with vaccines; unfounded fears about preservatives in the formulation; and, in some cases, a belief — contradicted by the science — that babies are born with everything they need.Some refusals have also been driven by a broader erosion of trust in medical institutions, a trend researchers say accelerated during and after the Covid pandemic. The shot is not a vaccine. It is a vitamin supplement.A vitamin, not a vaccine conspiracyThe rise in refusals tracks closely with growing skepticism toward medical institutions and the spread of inaccurate information online, according to researchers and clinicians. Among the most common points of confusion: parents mistaking the injection for a vaccine, even though vitamin K is a supplement derived from a plant, not a vaccine.Dr. Hill says the wellness industry bears significant responsibility.“Social media is a significant part of it, but when we look at the wellness industry as a whole, it’s important to understand that this is an extraordinarily well-funded and well-organized effort to sell products to people,” he explains. “This is not accidental. This is a profit-seeking enterprise with an extraordinarily powerful marketing apparatus. And we are seeing exactly what we see when marketing works.”The reported misconceptions parents arrive with are consistent and predictable.“The first is that vitamin K is dangerous in any way; it’s not. The second misconception is that it’s not necessary, but it absolutely is,” Dr. Hill underscores. “I hear things like, ‘babies are born with everything they need.’ In the case of vitamin K, they are not. Newborns are born with inadequate vitamin K stores, and breast milk is not a great source of vitamin K. When they are born, the gut bacteria necessary to process dietary vitamin K and convert it into an active form are not there yet.”Vitamin K is a fat-soluble nutrient the body needs to activate the proteins that allow blood to clot. Older children and adults obtain it primarily through leafy green vegetables and intestinal bacteria. Newborns, however, arrive with very little of it — the vitamin does not cross the placenta easily, breast milk contains only small amounts, and the gut bacteria needed to produce it internally take roughly six months to establish.Without the shot, an infant’s blood cannot clot effectively, medical professionals say, leaving the child vulnerable to bleeding anywhere in the body, including the brain.Some parents have sought out oral vitamin K as an alternative. Yet doctors say it is less reliable than the injection; absorption through a newborn’s gut is inconsistent, and the oral form requires multiple doses across the newborn period rather than the single injection given at birth.While concerns about the shot’s safety have circulated online for years, those claims have not been borne out by the clinical record, which spans more than six decades of routine use. Dr. Hill, for one, is emphatic on the question of risk.“It is as close to a risk-free intervention as I can think of,” he stresses. “We started doing this routinely in 1961, and in that time there has been one reported case of an allergic reaction — one, since 1961. So aside from the transient pain of the injection itself in that brief moment, there is really no downside we can point to. It’s all upside.”Newborns who do not receive the vitamin K shot are more than 81 times more likely to develop vitamin K deficiency bleeding than those who do, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.Bleeding can occur at any point during the first six months of life, ranging from bruising and gastrointestinal hemorrhage to bleeding in the brain. The vitamin K shot is one of three standard interventions newborns typically receive before leaving the hospital, alongside the hepatitis B vaccine and antibiotic eye ointment.Research published in the Maternal and Child Health Journal found that parents who decline the vitamin K shot are significantly more likely to also refuse the hepatitis B vaccine and the eye ointment, part of a broader pattern of rejecting standard preventive care at birth. One study found that 90 percent of parents who refused vitamin K also declined the hepatitis B vaccine, and 77 percent declined the eye ointment. Hospitals overwhelmed, data absent, deaths climbingHospital-level data is beginning to capture the scale of the shift. At St. Luke’s Health System, Idaho’s largest hospital network, refusal rates have increased every year since the start of the pandemic.In 2020, 3.8 percent of families declined the vitamin K shot. By 2025, that figure had risen to 9.8 percent, with one hospital in the system recording a refusal rate of 20 percent, according to hospital officials who shared their data with ProPublica. At least two babies treated at St. Luke’s died within that period from complications related to vitamin K deficiency bleeding, hospital officials confirmed. The pattern is not limited to Idaho. At St. Louis-based Mercy, which operates birthing hospitals across Missouri, Kansas, Oklahoma, and Arkansas, 1,552 babies did not receive the injection in 2025 — nearly three times the 536 recorded in 2021.The human toll Dr. Hill describes is no longer theoretical.“Within the last year, I cared for a toddler who was born in perfect health, did not receive the vitamin K injection, and had a stroke on the second day of life,” he recalls. “That child was subsequently neurologically devastated, with severe developmental delay and chronic seizures. Unfortunately, more and more of us are seeing these outcomes.”State and federal agencies do not track data on vitamin K injection refusal or subsequent bleeding, which impedes their ability to quantify outcomes, including deaths. The number of deaths directly attributed to vitamin K deficiency bleeding appears to be small, fewer than a dozen annually. Still, it has started to climb in recent years according to death certificate data.Those numbers may capture only a fraction of actual deaths, which are often classified only by their more immediate cause, such as bleeding in the brain.As one pediatric hospitalist at Yale Medicine put it, the lack of data almost serves as a reassurance to families that the risk is worth taking. Because no federal agency is systematically collecting refusal rates or linking them to infant deaths, the true scale of the crisis is unknown.Mr. Hill concurs that absence of data is itself dangerous.“The first thing we need to solve a problem is information about that problem,” he says. “When we are working in a vacuum, it’s very difficult to know what resources to bring to bear or what kind of messaging is most effective.”Some physicians have begun discussing whether vitamin K refusal could, in certain circumstances, raise child protection concerns. At least one hospital system now requires parents who decline the shot to sign a document acknowledging the risks and confirming they are declining against medical advice.The debate has reached Congress. A t anApril hearing of the House Energy and Commerce Health Subcommittee, a Washington Democrat and pediatrician, Representative Kim Schrier, pressed Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to endorse the vitamin K shot publicly. He declined.“I’ve never said, literally never said, anything about it,” Mr. Kennedy said.“That’s exactly the point,” Dr. Schrier replied. “You don’t say anything about it, but the doubt you’ve created about all of medicine and science is causing parents to make dangerous decisions.”In response, an HHS spokesperson attributed the rise in refusals to the Biden administration. Separately, a federal advisory committee stacked with Mr. Kennedy’s appointees voted in December to drop the longstanding recommendation to vaccinate all newborns against hepatitis B at birth, a decision a federal judg etemporarily blocked in March.A peer-reviewed analysis published in Pediatrics this May points to an additional complication: the shot’s own success may be working against it. Because vitamin K has essentially eliminated deficiency bleeding for decades, many parents today have never seen what the condition can do to a newborn.The physicians raising these concerns, however, are not calling for mandates. Dr. Hill says he knows where he would start.“I would like to see a federal campaign reinforcing the importance of the newborn vitamin K dose,” he adds. “We know that this kind of messaging has the power to save lives, and I would like to see the full force of the federal government behind it.”

Rising Refusals of Injection for Newborns Leave More Babies Dying From Brain Bleeds, Doctors Say

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