More US parents refusing newborn vitamin, risking dangerous bleeding

A shot of vitamin K can dramatically reduce the chance of serious bleeding in newborns and pediatricians such as Alison Bartlett recommend it as vital intervention. But she's seeing more and more parents in the U.S. decline the injection. It is heartbreaking and frustrating, right? All of us pediatricians have spent decades learning how to keep kids safe. A review of health records for more than 1 million births nationwide by health data and analytics company Truveta revealed the rate of newborns not receiving the vitamin K shot within a day of birth in hospitals rose 57 percent from January through June. I'll tell you how to start taking vaccine safety seriously. The spike in vitamin K refusals this year comes after U.S. Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.'s January announcement dropping recommendations for six standard childhood vaccines. Kennedy has not said anything specific about vitamin K, which is not a vaccine. But the potentially life-saving shot may be a casualty of growing hesitation around vaccinating children. I'm a little bit confused as to what is going on, honestly. And so I think it is potentially some confusion on what actually the vitamin K shot is and people wanting to potentially do less in terms of medical care for their babies. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention still recommends the shot and its data show why. Babies are born with very low levels of vitamin K, which helps blood to clot. Without the injection, CDC data show life-threatening bleeding in the brain or gut occurs in one out of 59 births. One out of five infants who experience serious bleeding will die. We are seeing some of these severe episodes of bleeding that I didn't see during my training because we were so much more diligent with our vitamin K shots. Dr. Sarah Coggins, who's now a neonatologist at the Children's Hospital of Philadelphia, says she's seen what vitamin K deficiency can do. I was at Vanderbilt in Nashville where, in I believe 2013, there was kind of an outbreak of several children who came into the Children's Hospital with head bleeding. And the CDC actually got involved to help figure out where all of this was coming from because it was really unusual. And it got sort of traced back to some families who had taken the advice to not give their children the vitamin K shot at birth because they were told, unfortunately and correctly, that the vitamin K was associated with the risk of cancer. When Kennedy, in January, dropped the recommendations for the six childhood vaccines, he said American children got too many shots. He suggested they were linked to chronic illness, a claim without evidence. Some of the information that folks are encountering on the internet and from their friends and family is, unfortunately, not accurate. In many cases, it's misinformation. And we do worry that some of this misinformation is influencing parents' decision to decline the vitamin K shot. A spokesperson from the Department of Health and Human Services said, quote, concerns about vitamin K and declining trust in public health institutions predate this administration and grew during the COVID-19 pandemic amid heavy-handed mandates during the Biden administration. The spokesperson added that the agency is working to rebuild trust, including through respect for individual choice, and that HHS and the CDC are evaluating available data and surveillance related to vitamin K refusal and associated bleeding events.