Vaccines aren’t the only near-miraculous medical intervention some Americans are turning their backs on. New research out today finds that more newborns are not receiving a safe supplement that protects them from serious bleeding.
Doctors at The Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia (CHOP) studied the medical records of newborns. In recent years, they found, an increasing number of children have not been given an intramuscular dose of vitamin K soon after birth—likely due to more parents refusing the shot.
“There may be a growing perception among parents that vitamin K is unnecessary,” said lead author and neonatologist Kristan Scott in a statement from CHOP.
Safe and effective
Our bodies use vitamin K to produce many of the proteins that help us clot blood when needed. We get some vitamin K from the bacteria in our gut, but mostly from food.
Unfortunately, babies are born with relatively low levels of vitamin K. It also takes months until the baby can obtain enough vitamin K on its own from solid foods and their gut bacteria (breast milk typically contains little vitamin K, so it can’t remedy this alone). These low levels in infants can then cause a rare but potentially life-threatening condition called vitamin K deficiency bleeding, or VKDB. If this bleeding occurs in the brain, it can lead to a stroke.
Since 1961, groups like the American Academy of Pediatrics have recommended that all newborns be given a single dose of vitamin K at birth. And this measure has all but eliminated the risk of vitamin K deficiency and VKDB among babies in the U.S. But as of late, the researchers began noticing more families refusing the shot, though anecdotally. So they decided to see whether this trend might be happening on a national level.
They analyzed data from EPIC Cosmos, a database of medical records collected from healthcare systems across the country. All told, they examined the records of around 5 million newborns between 2017 and 2024. Over the study period, the annual percentage of newborns not receiving vitamin K noticeably rose, from 2.92% in 2017 to 5.18% in 2024—a 77% relative increase.
Why are parents refusing vitamin K for their babies?
The team’s findings, published Monday in JAMA, can’t provide a concrete answer as to why more infants are not getting vitamin K at birth. That said, there haven’t been any changes in medical guidelines, suggesting that more parents are refusing to let their children receive the shot.
Part of this rise may stem from the covid-19 pandemic, the authors speculate. The pandemic fueled mistrust of public health authorities, for both legitimate and not-so-legitimate reasons. One example of the latter is the increased relevance of the anti-vaccination movement, which continues to falsely attack the covid-19 mRNA vaccines as dangerous, gene-altering weapons of mass destruction. But the pandemic may not be the only factor behind this trend, the researchers note, since the rate of vitamin K refusal actually first began to rise in 2019.
It’s possible that some people are wrongly conflating vitamin K shots with vaccines. And even if not, there’s certainly some overlap between people who deny the benefits of supplemental vitamin K at birth and anti-vaccination proponents.
In any case, it’s the infants of these families who will potentially suffer the most.
“Unfortunately, opting out of Vitamin K for a newborn is akin to gambling with a child’s health, forgoing a straightforward and safe measure that effectively prevents severe complications,” said Scott.
This isn’t the only concerning trend for the health of babies in the U.S., either. Just last week, a government-organized advisory panel—recently reassembled by antivaxxer and health secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.—struck down a decades-long recommendation to universally vaccinate children at birth against hepatitis B.
