Babies are being born, skipping a routine shot that costs almost nothing, and then bleeding into their brains and dying. The federal government isn't tracking it. And the man whose job it is to protect public health won't even tell parents the shot is safe.
The Shot That's Been Standard Since Eisenhower Was President
The vitamin K injection has been recommended for every newborn in the United States since 1961. That's not new science. That's not experimental. The American Academy of Pediatrics put this on the standard-of-care list before color television was in most American homes. You get the shot, your blood clots properly, you live. Simple.
What's happened since is that a rising tide of medical misinformation has convinced a growing number of parents to refuse it. ProPublica has been digging into this story, and what they found is ugly. A national study of more than five million births found that refusal rates topped 5% in 2024. Some hospitals told ProPublica their refusal rates have more than doubled in recent years. And the babies who don't get the shot? According to research, they are 81 times more likely to develop late vitamin K deficiency bleeding, which can cause uncontrolled hemorrhaging into the brain. Per the CDC's own data, one in every five babies who develop vitamin K deficiency bleeding will die.
Think about that number for a second. One in five. These aren't rare statistical anomalies. These are preventable deaths happening right now, in American hospitals, because parents were scared off a sixty-year-old injection by bad information on the internet.
Nobody Is Counting the Bodies
Here's where it gets worse, and it was genuinely hard to rank which part of this story was the worst part. No federal agency is tracking vitamin K shot refusals. No state agencies are tracking them either. Nobody is counting how many babies develop vitamin K deficiency bleeding. Nobody has a reliable national number on how many have died.
ProPublica's investigation was the thing that dragged this crisis into public view. Which means the federal government, in 2025, is relying on journalists to do the basic epidemiological surveillance work that the CDC exists to do. This is not a niche data gap. This is the public health equivalent of not tracking whether a measles outbreak is spreading. Dr. Andrew Racine, president of the American Academy of Pediatrics, made exactly that comparison, telling ProPublica that the CDC's tracking function is essential for doctors to diagnose and treat sick infants quickly. "We depend upon the CDC to let us know about that," he said.
Without the data, you can't build a public health response. You can't run a targeted education campaign. You can't even measure whether things are getting better or worse. You're flying blind while babies bleed.
Congress Sends a Letter. The CDC Gets a New Homework Assignment.
Two Democratic lawmakers, Rep. Kim Schrier of Washington and Sen. Angela Alsobrooks of Maryland, sent a letter last week to CDC acting director Dr. Jay Bhattacharya demanding the agency take immediate action. Specifically, they want the CDC to start tracking refusal rates, vitamin K deficiency bleeding cases, and preventable deaths. The letter cited ProPublica's investigation directly. "Recent reporting from ProPublica has highlighted a major problem," they wrote, "the federal government does not currently track vitamin K shot refusal, vitamin K deficiency bleeding, or the preventable deaths related to vitamin K deficiency."
Schrier told ProPublica that the solution is straightforward. Get accurate, modern data, and make it public. "Once you stop doing these things that are preventative, cases rise," she said. That's not a radical position. That's epidemiology 101. The fact that it requires a congressional letter to a federal health agency to make this happen in 2025 tells you a great deal about where we are.
Alsobrooks, for her part, went further. She has already called for RFK Jr.'s resignation, and she used this moment to call on him to do the bare minimum his job requires.
RFK Jr.'s Strategy: Say Nothing, Blame Biden
Sen. Alsobrooks was direct about what she wants from Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. She wants him to publicly and clearly endorse the vitamin K shot. "There are so many who are hanging on the word and advice of a person in his position," she told ProPublica. "I think he has a moral obligation to state in clear and no uncertain terms that this is safe and effective, and that families should be giving this shot to their babies."
Kennedy has previously refused to endorse the shot. When pressed, he has reportedly claimed he has "never said anything about the injection," which is a masterclass in saying nothing while appearing to respond. Say nothing, avoid blame, let the information vacuum fill itself with fear and misinformation. That's the strategy. It's working great if your goal is infant mortality.
An HHS spokesperson gave ProPublica a statement confirming that the CDC does recommend the shot, which is the absolute floor of what a functional health agency should communicate. The spokesperson also blamed declining uptake on the COVID-19 pandemic and, naturally, the Biden administration. So we're blaming a previous administration for a crisis the current administration's own leader is actively making worse by refusing to speak clearly. Cool. Very cool.
What the Refusal Wave Actually Looks Like
The vitamin K shot is not a vaccine. That bears repeating because part of what's driving refusal is the same anti-vaccine sentiment that RFK Jr. spent decades cultivating before somehow becoming the person in charge of the nation's health. Parents who've absorbed years of generalized medical mistrust are applying it indiscriminately, declining interventions that have nothing to do with vaccination but got swept up in the same paranoid wave.
The AAP has been worried about this for some time, Dr. Racine told ProPublica, and applauded the lawmakers and ProPublica for forcing the issue into the open. His point about messaging was crisp: tracking the data matters, but so does communicating clearly about the consequences of refusal. "It's not simply to track it," he said. "It's to message it." The person best positioned to message it is the Secretary of Health and Human Services. He won't.
The Dingo Take
Let's be absolutely clear about what is happening here. Babies are dying from a condition that has been preventable since the Kennedy administration, the first one, and the man currently running American health policy refuses to say out loud that the cheap, safe, routine injection that prevents it is worth getting. That's not a policy disagreement. That's not a nuanced debate about government overreach. That's a federal official failing the most basic possible duty of his office while infants pay for it.
The HHS spokesperson's move to blame Biden for the decline in public health trust is genuinely something. RFK Jr. spent the better part of two decades as the country's most prominent and well-funded spreader of vaccine and medical misinformation, helped shred public confidence in health institutions, rode that wave into a cabinet position, and his staff is out here blaming the previous administration for the distrust. The audacity is breathtaking. It would almost be funny if the consequence wasn't babies hemorrhaging into their brains.
Congress shouldn't have to send letters to the CDC demanding that it track preventable infant deaths. Journalists shouldn't be the ones doing the surveillance work that federal agencies exist to do. And a sitting health secretary absolutely should not need public pressure from two senators to say three words about a sixty-year-old medical standard. Say the shot is safe. Say it clearly. Say it today. The fact that he won't tells you everything you need to know about who he is and what this administration actually cares about.
