Here’s the latest example of how suspicion of vaccines is, lamentably, gripping far too many Americans: Parents are refusing vitamin K shots for newborns, even though they are not even vaccines, sometimes with tragic results. Thus does ideological fearmongering further erode the hard-earned triumphs of medical innovation.
Vitamin K is necessary for blood clotting, but infants typically are not born with sufficient levels of the vitamin and can suffer serious health problems as a result. Before physicians started routinely injecting infants with the compound in the early 1960s, up to 1 in 60 newborns experienced incidents of uncontrolled bleeding.
A new JAMA study, which examined 5.2 million infants, found that 6.8 percent of newborns did not receive vitamin K shots in 2025, more than double the 3.1 percent in 2017. Across the study period, infants who did not receive the shot had a 47 percent higher adjusted risk of bleeding in their first six months of life. Their risk of bleeding in or around the brain, which can lead to lifelong disabilities and death, was 2.43 times higher. Among the 235,000 infants who did not receive vitamin K, 69 died during their birth hospitalization with a concurrent bleeding diagnosis, a rate nearly three times that among babies who received the shot.
A separate JAMA Pediatrics study, encompassing 11 million infants, documented the consequences of this trend in another way. Between 2017 and 2025, the rate of diagnosed vitamin K-deficient bleeding rose 347 percent, from 24 cases per 100,000 infants to 107.4 per 100,000.
Some of those refusing the injections for their children are vaccine-hesitant parents who associate all shots with immunizations. Americans increasingly do not trust the medical establishment, often falling for social media influencers peddling false information and sketchy alternatives to well-established medicines. It didn’t help that Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. refused to endorse vitamin K shots when pressed to do so during an April congressional hearing.
The result is a twisted sort of trypanophobia, or fear of needles. Some parents have opted to give their babies oral drops of vitamin K, despite warnings from pediatricians that they are not nearly as effective as the shots.
The vitamin K shot is inexpensive, more than 60 years old and remarkably effective. The treatment deserves to be celebrated as a medical innovation that made a once-common danger so rare that Americans forgot there was anything to fear. It’s beyond unfortunate that even one newborn is suffering the consequence.
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