\n This story was originally published by <\/em>ProPublica<\/em><\/a>, a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power. Sign up to receive <\/em>its biggest stories<\/em><\/a> as soon as they\u2019re published.<\/em>\n <\/p>\n \n They entered the world the way babies should, with piercing cries announcing their arrival. They passed their newborn screening tests. Some made it to their 2-week wellness visits without concern.\n <\/p>\n \n Then, without warning, their systems began to shut down. A 7-week-old boy in Maryland developed sudden seizures. An 11-pound girl in Alabama stopped breathing for 20 seconds at a time. A baby boy in Kentucky vomited before becoming lethargic. A brown-haired girl in Texas, not yet 2 weeks old, bled around her belly button.\n <\/p>\n \n Desperate to save them, records show, doctors inserted tubes into their airways and hooked them up to IVs. They ordered blood transfusions. They spent half an hour trying to resuscitate one boy until his parents told them they could stop. They shaved another boy\u2019s soft locks to embed a needle directly into his skull to reduce the pressure in his brain.\n <\/p>\n \n None of it was enough.\n <\/p>\n \n At the morgue, the babies were brought in with their diapers and blankets and with their hospital ID bracelets still wrapped around their tiny ankles. The pathologists\u2019 findings were like those you would typically see in ailing adults, not newborns \u2014 the kind of bleeding seen during strokes or brain tissue loss similar to what happens when radiation is administered to treat cancer.\n <\/p>\n \n Their autopsies, which took place over the last several years, all came to the same conclusion: The deaths were caused, in whole or in part, by a rare but potentially fatal condition known as vitamin K deficiency bleeding.\n <\/p>\n \n In almost every case, the babies\u2019 deaths could have been prevented with a long-standard vitamin K shot. But across the country, families \u2014 first in smatterings, now in droves \u2014 are declining the single, inexpensive injection given at birth to newborns to help their blood clot.\n <\/p>\n \n Many of them are doing so out of a well-meaning but ill-informed abundance of caution. In the hopes of safeguarding their newborns from what they see as unnecessary medical intervention, they have shunned fundamental and scientifically sound pharmaceutical intervention. The trend is also fueled by a contradictory pairing: families\u2019 fierce desire to protect their babies and a cascade of false information infused into their social media algorithms.\n <\/p>\n \n Although it is not a vaccine, the vitamin K shot has been swept up in the same post-pandemic tide that has led to a drop in key childhood vaccines, including for measles and whooping cough<\/a>.\n <\/p>\n \n The vitamin K shot is one of the three main interventions, along with the hepatitis B vaccine and an antibiotic ointment in the eyes, that newborns typically receive before leaving the hospital. Leading American institutions and the World Health Organization recommend that newborns get the shot.\n <\/p>\n \n In December, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention stopped recommending that all newborns get the hepatitis B vaccine, which has been highly effective at fighting a virus that can lead to lifelong infections and liver cancer. A federal judge in March temporarily blocked the revised childhood vaccination schedule that included that recommendation. Some families are also rejecting the eye ointment.\n <\/p>\n \n Two weeks ago, at a House subcommittee hearing, Rep. Kim Schrier, D-Wash., pressed Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to reassure parents that the vitamin K shot is safe. He refused and pushed back.\n <\/p>\n \n \u201cI\u2019ve never said, literally never said, anything about it,\u201d Kennedy said.\n <\/p>\n \n \u201cThat\u2019s exactly the point,\u201d responded Schrier, who is a doctor. \u201cYou don\u2019t say anything about it, but the doubt you\u2019ve created about all of medicine and science is causing parents to make dangerous decisions.\u201d\n <\/p>\n \n An HHS spokesperson did not respond to questions but in an email blamed the administration of former President Joe Biden for the rise in parents rejecting vitamin K shots. \u201cVitamin K at birth,\u201d the spokesperson added, \u201cremains the standard of care.\u201d\n <\/p>\n \n Meanwhile, families continue to be inundated with advice from self-proclaimed experts using medical terms incorrectly and misunderstanding science to convince parents that getting the shot could put their newborns at risk of grave harm.\n <\/p>\n \n Nearly a century\u2019s worth of research and medical advancements shows the opposite to be true.\n <\/p>\n \n Babies who don\u2019t get the vitamin K shot, research shows<\/a>, are 81 times more likely than those who do to develop late vitamin K deficiency bleeding, where in many cases oxygen can\u2019t reach their brains and blood pools around their skulls. Perhaps most alarming is that, according to the CDC, 1 in every 5 babies with vitamin K deficiency bleeding will die.\n <\/p>\n \n Determining precisely how many babies have died or suffered severe brain damage because of a lack of vitamin K is difficult. State and federal agencies don\u2019t track data around vitamin K injection refusal or subsequent bleeding, which impedes their ability to quantify and track outcomes, including death.\n <\/p>\n \n The number of deaths directly attributed to vitamin K deficiency bleeding appears to be small \u2014 fewer than a dozen annually \u2014 but has started to climb in recent years, according to death certificate data from federal and state agencies.\n <\/p>\n \n But those numbers capture only a fraction of deaths, which often are classified only by other, more immediate causes, such as bleeding in the brain. In 2024, for example, more than 700 newborns died from spontaneous bleeding in their brains, which could have been complicated by liver disease or prematurity. Still, six medical specialists and one official at the CDC said a meaningful portion of those deaths likely were caused by vitamin K deficiency. Many more babies survive the bleeding but suffer massive brain bleeds and lasting injuries.\n <\/p>\n \n \u201cA lot of the providers don\u2019t have this on their radar,\u201d said Dr. Jaspreet Loyal, a pediatric hospitalist at Yale Medicine. \u201cThe lack of data is almost acting like a reassurance for families that this risk is worth taking.\u201d\n <\/p>\n \n Although it is difficult to quantify deaths attributable to vitamin K deficiency, there is clearly a large jump in the number of parents declining the vitamin K shot. Some hospitals have seen refusal rates more than double. A national study<\/a> of more than 5 million births, published in December, found that the rate of U.S. babies not receiving vitamin K at birth topped 5% in 2024 \u2014 up 77% from 2017.\n <\/p>\n \n The success of the shot has been so remarkable that it nearly eliminated vitamin K deficiency bleeding altogether. The science was settled decades ago.\n <\/p>\n \n \u201cThis was not something we even bothered to spend much educational effort on,\u201d said Dr. Allison Henry, the director of newborn medicine service at Cedars-Sinai Guerin Children\u2019s in Los Angeles, \u201cbecause there was this simple, safe intervention.\u201d\n <\/p>\n \n A cluster of cases 13 years ago was one of the first major signs that something was amiss.\n <\/p>\n \n Four babies were rushed to a Nashville, Tennessee, children\u2019s hospital after they suddenly fell ill months apart. Stunned, doctors ran tests that revealed severe bleeding and reached out to Dr. Robert Sidonio Jr., their blood disorder specialist. They learned that the parents had declined vitamin K shots for the babies, each of them between 6 and 15 weeks old.\n <\/p>\n \n Once they realized that, the medical team moved quickly to treat them, injecting them with vitamin K and hoping it wasn\u2019t too late. Much to the relief of doctors, they all survived. Only one infant had developmental delays.\n <\/p>\n \n The parents explained that they had declined the shot for a number of reasons: a concern, based on long-debunked claims, that the shot could cause leukemia; a belief that the shot wasn\u2019t necessary; and a desire to reduce their baby\u2019s exposure to \u201ctoxins.\u201d\n <\/p>\n \n The CDC and the state health department opened an investigation and later published a report that found that when the parents declined the shot, their awareness about the risk of bleeding was \u201cincomplete or absent.\u201d\n <\/p>\n \n Dr. Anna Morad, a pediatrician at Monroe Carell Jr. Children\u2019s Hospital at Vanderbilt in Nashville, said she had witnessed a gradual rise in families refusing vitamin K leading up to the hospitalizations.\n <\/p>\n \n She and her colleagues went into the Nashville community to speak at birthing centers and advise families about the benefits of vitamin K. One mother who had refused the shot for her newborn partnered with Morad and described how she came to realize that the shot can save lives.\n <\/p>\n \n More than a dozen pediatricians interviewed by ProPublica said they strongly recommend all three of the typical newborn interventions but agreed that the vitamin K shot is the most vital.\n <\/p>\n \n \u201cI\u2019m picking vitamin K every day,\u201d Morad said. \u201cAbsolutely.\u201d\n <\/p>\n \n With time, the number of families who turned down the shot dropped. As the need for the community outreach waned, Morad lost touch with the mother she had teamed up with and refocused her energy on directing the newborn nursery at Vanderbilt Health.\n <\/p>\n \n \u201cI\u2019ll be honest, I thought we had turned the corner,\u201d Morad said. \u201cNaively, I thought that would be enough.\u201d\n <\/p>\n \n All newborns lack vitamin K. No matter how much vitamin K a mother consumes, it doesn\u2019t sufficiently pass through the placenta, and breast milk contains only small amounts. That puts babies who are exclusively breastfed at a higher risk for vitamin K deficiency bleeding. Formula is fortified with vitamin K, but even with that, experts agree, babies should still get the shot.\n <\/p>\n \n Doctors have yet to understand why some babies who don\u2019t get the vitamin K shot are fine while others bleed uncontrollably. But they do know that the risk increases dramatically. For babies who don\u2019t get the shot, the risk for vitamin K deficiency bleeding from a week after birth to 6 months ranges from 1 in 14,000 to 1 in 25,000 births. With the shot, the research shows, the risk drops to less than 1 in 100,000.\n <\/p>\n \n The role of vitamin K is so crucial that researchers were awarded the Nobel Prize in 1943 for their discovery of its ability to form clots and stop bleeding in babies. The official presenting the award called the discovery the vitamin\u2019s \u201cgreatest practical importance\u201d and lauded it among the discoveries that have been of great benefit to humankind.\n <\/p>\n \n In 1961, the American Academy of Pediatrics recommended that all newborns in the U.S. get a shot of vitamin K. The CDC has supported newborns getting the shot as well, devoting several pages online to raising awareness around vitamin K deficiency bleeding and writing that babies may bleed \u201cinto their intestines, or into their brain, which can lead to brain damage and even death.\u201d For decades, medical textbooks and lectures have presented the vitamin K injection as an example of a public health policy success.\n <\/p>\n \n After reports that vitamin K deficiency bleeding was on the rise, the American Academy of Pediatrics updated its policy statement in 2022 to stress the shot\u2019s safety and efficacy. The paper included talking points for pediatricians to help them respond to common misconceptions: \u201cVitamin K injection does not contain mercury. Vitamin K does not cause cancer. The vitamin K injection used in newborns is safe. The dose is not too high for newborns.\u201d\n <\/p>\n \n \u201cWe\u2019re a victim of our own success,\u201d said Dr. Ivan Hand, the director of neonatology at Kings County Hospital Center in New York and the co-author of the American Academy of Pediatrics statement. \u201cSince we\u2019ve been treating babies with vitamin K, we haven\u2019t seen much deficiency bleeding, so people think it doesn\u2019t exist.\u201d\n <\/p>\n \n Seeing photos online of healthy babies who didn\u2019t get the vitamin K shot and reading comments from parents who felt justified in their refusal, it\u2019s easy to think that the risk of bleeding isn\u2019t real, or at the very least that it\u2019s exaggerated.\n <\/p>\n \n On Facebook, comments about the shot include: \u201cDon\u2019t do it!\u201d \u201cHuge lie!\u201d and \u201cIt\u2019s a scare tactic.\u201d One person wrote, \u201cNever will I ever inject my baby with poisons from big pharma.\u201d\n <\/p>\n \n Families have also pointed to a 2023 episode about vitamin K shots by conservative podcaster Candace Owens, who said, \u201cWhat Big Pharma is saying is that we realize that babies were born wrong. They don\u2019t have enough vitamin K, and so we\u2019re going to give them what they always needed. God designed us wrong.\u201d\n <\/p>\n \n Owens did not respond to a request for comment.\n <\/p>\n \n Hidden is the agony of parents mourning the loss of their babies. Some are still in denial.\n <\/p>\n \n ProPublica spoke with five of those families, but none of them wanted to be identified publicly.\n <\/p>\n \n The obituaries, social media posts and GoFundMe pages capture the utter despair of the families, though none of them reckon with the decision not to get the vitamin K shot.\n <\/p>\n \n \u201cNo one could\u2019ve prepared us for the heartbreak we faced 6 weeks after our little miracle was born,\u201d one mother wrote. \u201cShe had a spontaneous unexplained brain bleed that led to brain death.\u201d\n <\/p>\n \n \u201cWe miss his sweet smell,\u201d another family wrote.\n <\/p>\n \n A third family, who made their decision after reading about vitamin K on social media and talking with their midwife, dismissed the vitamin K shot altogether. Instead, the father expressed outrage at the hospital for not delaying the clamping of the umbilical cord. He said he believed doing so would have allowed his son to be infused with vitamin K from the cord blood, a popular theory on social media. Research, however, shows that while delayed cord clamping can raise the baby\u2019s hemoglobin levels, it does not have the same effect on vitamin K.\n <\/p>\n \n \u201cI figured the hospital was already pissy with me because we didn\u2019t vaccinate at all,\u201d he told ProPublica. \u201cThey lost out on all the money from that.\u201d\n <\/p>\n \n The family\u2019s anger has subsided some since the baby\u2019s death, in part because of their trust in God\u2019s plan.\n <\/p>\n \n \u201cI can sit here and be upset and sad, but this brought me closer to God,\u201d the father said. \u201cI just can\u2019t wait to be with him.\u201d\n <\/p>\n \n Two of the families who went on to have other children found themselves facing the same decision: Would they decline the vitamin K shot again? Both got the shot for their newborn.\n <\/p>\n \n Morad watched as the number of families declining vitamin K climbed over the last year.\n <\/p>\n \n In January, she reached out to Sidonio, her former colleague who first recognized the 2013 cluster of cases there, for advice. Sidonio, now a pediatric hematologist oncologist at Children\u2019s Healthcare of Atlanta and professor at Emory University School of Medicine, said he\u2019s more worried than ever.\n <\/p>\n \n During that cluster, Sidonio recognized the need to collect data on how often parents decline the shot and what happens to those babies. But in discussions with the CDC, he said, he was told that it would be too difficult.\n <\/p>\n \n More than a decade later, nothing has come of it. In a recent email to ProPublica, federal officials said vitamin K deficiency bleeding has never been submitted for consideration as a notifiable condition.\n <\/p>\n \n \u201cIf you don\u2019t track it, you don\u2019t document it,\u201d said Sidonio, frustration building in his voice. \u201cThey have to make it a reportable health condition, just like a new measles case. That\u2019s the only way it\u2019s going to change.\u201d\n <\/p>\n \n Like him, Dr. Kristan Scott, the lead author of the national study that found a jump in the number of babies not receiving vitamin K, also landed on a need for a robust system to monitor vitamin K refusals and any subsequent consequences.\n <\/p>\n \n \u201cWe don\u2019t have a clean data repository provided by public health systems or the state that would allow us to be able to track this in a more systematic fashion,\u201d said Scott, who is a neonatologist at the Children\u2019s Hospital of Philadelphia.\n <\/p>\n \n Some doctors failed to recognize the role of vitamin K when a baby came into their emergency rooms, let alone knew how to reverse the damage from the declined shots. Many of them encountered the condition only in medical school textbooks.\n <\/p>\n \n Some hospitals have started to run their own numbers, but the effort is scattershot. The data is also usually kept in house, so there\u2019s not a wider knowledge of the problem. Recognizing the urgency of the matter, officials at a handful of hospitals agreed to share their data with ProPublica.\n <\/p>\n \n Doctors at St. Louis-based Mercy, which runs birthing hospitals in Missouri, Kansas, Oklahoma and Arkansas, began noticing an uptick in families turning down the vitamin K shot during the pandemic. Last year, 1,552 babies across all Mercy hospitals didn\u2019t get the injection. In 2021, that number was 536.\n <\/p>\n \n And at Idaho\u2019s largest hospital system, the refusal rates have gone up every year since the start of the pandemic, and in some cases have more than doubled. In 2020, 3.8% of families across St. Luke\u2019s Health System declined the vitamin K shot for their babies. In 2025, that figure jumped to 9.8%. One hospital even reached 20% of babies not getting vitamin K shots.\n <\/p>\n \n At least two babies treated at St. Luke\u2019s died within the last year from complications related to vitamin K deficiency bleeding, hospital officials confirmed. But Dr. Tom Patterson, a pediatrician who treats newborns at some St. Luke\u2019s hospitals and is among the most vocal in warning about the climbing refusal rates, suspects there may be more.\n <\/p>\n \n Patterson recently pleaded with a family to allow their baby to get the shot. The father refused and shocked the doctor by going even further. He approached the nurses to complain about Patterson pushing the matter.\n <\/p>\n<\/p><\/div>\n This story was originally published by ProPublica, a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power. Sign up to receive its biggest stories as soon as they\u2019re published. They entered the world the way babies should, with piercing cries announcing their arrival. They passed their newborn screening tests. Some made it to their 2-week wellness visits … Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":30142,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"fifu_image_url":"","fifu_image_alt":"","_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-30141","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/www.jubi24.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/05\/Babies-are-bleeding-to-death-as-parents-reject-a-vitamin.jpg","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jubi24.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/30141","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jubi24.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jubi24.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jubi24.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jubi24.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=30141"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.jubi24.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/30141\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":30143,"href":"https:\/\/www.jubi24.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/30141\/revisions\/30143"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jubi24.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/30142"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jubi24.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=30141"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jubi24.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=30141"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jubi24.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=30141"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"Autopsy](\"https:\/\/www.jubi24.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/05\/c-autopsiesredacted.jpg\")
\n <\/div>\n<\/div>\n
\n
Source link <\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"