Infant Vitamin K refusals are climbing across the United States, leaving newborns hospitalized with internal bleeding and brain hemorrhages, Antena 3 reported.
Electronic health records show that 5.2 percent of babies in the United States did not receive the routine Vitamin K injection in 2024, an increase from 2.9 percent in 2017. More than 15 doctors told The New York Times that they have witnessed an even sharper rise in refusals over the past two years.
The intervention is critical because newborns naturally possess very low levels of the nutrient. Vitamin K enables blood clotting, and without it, infants face life-threatening spontaneous bleeding risks during their first weeks and months of life.
“It is not something unusual anymore,” said Meghan Martin, a pediatric emergency medicine physician at Johns Hopkins All Children’s Hospital in Florida, who treats infants with deficiency bleeding every one to two months.
When Jessica Kirk worked in a Florida pediatric emergency department in 2021, she treated a newborn bleeding from the umbilical stump whose parents had declined the standard injection, Antena 3 reported.
Medical literature notes that about 1 in 60 infants who skip the injection experience bleeding during their first week of life. Symptoms can range from unusual sleepiness and poor feeding to seizures, vomiting blood, and intracranial hemorrhages.
The investigation showed that he had a cerebral hemorrhage, said Jeremy Jacobs, an assistant professor specializing in blood coagulation at Vanderbilt University Medical Center, describing an infant who arrived for intervention.
Roughly 20 percent of Vitamin K deficiency bleeding cases prove fatal. Survivors frequently sustain permanent brain damage, intellectual disabilities, or long-term dependence on ventilators and feeding tubes.
Medical experts trace the growing rejection of the prophylactic shot to broader vaccine hesitancy and online misinformation. Parents frequently encounter unverified claims on social media linking the injection to childhood leukemia, a hypothesis thoroughly debunked by multiple large-scale studies.
Other parents express concern over trace amounts of benzyl alcohol preservatives, though preservative-free formulations exist. Annemarie Stroustrup, vice president for pediatric services at Northwell Health in New York and Connecticut, said that some families underestimate the danger.
“They will say that it is a one-in-a-million bleeding risk. Categorically, it is not,” Stroustrup said.
Political figures and advocacy groups have also amplified skepticism toward standard medical guidance. The Children’s Health Defense, previously led by Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., has questioned the safety of newborn injections.
The United States currently lacks a centralized monitoring system to track Vitamin K deficiency bleeding cases nationwide. To address this data gap, Senator Angela Alsobrooks and Representative Kim Schrier urged the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in June to publicly track both injection refusals and associated bleeding episodes.
Schrier, a pediatrician before entering Congress, emphasized that official metrics would ground physician-parent consultations in concrete evidence rather than theoretical risk.
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