When pediatricians talk about bleeding from not getting enough vitamin K, they sound very scary. It doesn’t seem to make itself known like a fever, rash, or something a parent could hear on a baby monitor at 2 a.m. It comes on slowly in a child who looked fine the day before. The brain is already bleeding by the time anyone figures out what’s going on.
That’s happening more and more often. In early November, two peer-reviewed studies published in JAMA and JAMA Pediatrics found that between 2017 and 2025, the number of people bleeding from not getting enough vitamin K rose by 347 percent. In the same time period, from 97.7 percent to 95 percent, the number of newborns who got the standard vitamin K shot went down. It sounds low-key. When you consider that millions of babies are born every year, that’s a very large number of babies who are not safe.
Even though the numbers are scary, what’s really going on may be even scarier. Doctors aren’t seeing a strange new illness appear. They are seeing parents turn down an offer that has been made every year since 1961. It’s become even more clear why it should be done since then, but more and more families are saying no in pediatric offices across the country.
Vitamin K is needed for blood to clot. People get most of theirs from food, but babies don’t have much when they are born because the placenta doesn’t do a good job of transferring the vitamin, and breast milk doesn’t have much of it either.
The gap is normal, but it’s also very dangerous. A small but real number of babies will have problems with bleeding if nothing is done. Some are not too bad. Some of them aren’t. The late form of VKDB can show up anywhere from two weeks to three months after birth and can cause a baby to bleed in the brain with no prior symptoms. A child who seemed healthy had bleeding in the brain. That’s sometimes the first sign that something is wrong.
Because of the refusals, it’s hard not to see a pattern. The shot of vitamin K is not a vaccine. But it has been brought up in conversations about vaccine doubt anyway, partly because it involves a needle and partly because it comes at the same stressful time for new parents when all the paperwork seems so big.
A study from 1992, which is still being shared online, also brought up the idea of a possible link to childhood leukemia. Several research groups looked into that question and couldn’t find a solid link. So far as science is concerned, the problem was solved. It gets passed around online as if that follow-up work never happened.
Dr. Karen Rose, a pediatrician who talked about the new study in public this week, did so with a level of careful frustration that seems to be common in her field right now. Vitamin K has been widely used for decades without any major problems being reported. It’s not that the shot hurts anyone that worries people. The worry is about what might happen without it—the bleeding after the circumcision, the nonstop bleeding from the umbilical cord, and, worst of all, the sudden brain bleeding in a baby who seemed to be fine before.
The medicine has not changed. It’s the trust. Something has changed in the way some parents deal with regular medical advice, especially when it comes to injections, over the past ten years. Doctors now spend more time calming people’s fears, staying with families longer, and going over the biology instead of just giving advice. That is a reasonable answer. It also shows how much harder the job is to do than it used to be in order to provide care to almost everyone.
Although not quite alarming, there is a sense of it in the way that researchers and clinicians talk about these numbers. On a graph, a drop from 97.7 to 95 percent might not look like much. But the health of a whole population doesn’t usually fail all at once.
It usually happens slowly, in tiny percentages, until emergency rooms start to see cases. The data comes in months later. The link that the JAMA studies found between less vitamin K absorption and more bleeding cases is not a coincidence; the researchers made that clear. It has a cause.
It only takes seconds to give the injection. The vitamin is put into the thigh muscle of a baby, where it is stored by the liver. This protects the baby during the most dangerous time. It’s over when babies cry, because that’s what babies do. It’s something to study, argue about, and say no to, which makes me feel uneasy about where medical trust stands right now.
There’s a chance that some of that gap can be closed by better communication. It’s also possible that the numbers won’t start going back the other way until more years of data, case reports, and tough conversations are had.
FAQs
1. What causes vitamin K deficiency bleeding in newborns?
Babies are born with almost no vitamin K, leaving their blood unable to clot properly.
2. How dangerous is VKDB?
It can cause silent brain bleeding in infants who appeared completely healthy beforehand.
3. Why are more babies developing VKDB now?
More parents are declining the routine vitamin K injection offered at birth.
4. Is the vitamin K shot the same as a vaccine?
No — it delivers a nutrient, not an immune trigger, and contains no live agents.
5. How much has VKDB increased in recent years?
Diagnoses rose 347 percent between 2017 and 2025 as shot acceptance declined.