🎙 The newborn shot more babies are going without | The Receipts - Dataspheres AI

The newborn shot more babies are going without (6 min), with captions The story Two studies published on November 5, 2026 found that a growing share of new...

The newborn shot more babies are going without (6 min), with captions The story Two studies published on November 5, 2026 found that a growing share of newborns in the United States are going without the vitamin K injection given in the first hours of life. One study in JAMA examined 5,240,780 infants born at 35 to 43 weeks, and one in JAMA Pediatrics examined 11,000,782 infants aged up to six months. Both covered the same nine years, 2017 to 2025. The shot matters because babies are born with very little vitamin K, which blood needs to clot. Pediatricians in the United States have recommended one injection in the thigh within six hours of birth for every newborn since 1961. Without it, bleeding can begin inside the skull or the gut with no outward warning, a condition called vitamin K deficiency bleeding. The CDC puts the late form, which runs from one week to six months, at 81 times more likely in infants who did not get the shot. In the JAMA cohort, 3.1 per cent of newborns had no recorded vitamin K in 2017, rising to 6.8 per cent in 2025. The second study counted the same movement from the other side: 97.7 per cent of newborns got the injection in 2017 and 95.0 per cent in 2025. Both studies read hospital births, so home births are under-represented in each. The JAMA Pediatrics team counted 189 cases of vitamin K deficiency bleeding in 2017, 903 in 2024 and 1,764 in 2025, nearly doubling in the last year alone. Across the nine years they counted 5,217 cases in all and put the rise in the rate at 215.7 per cent. Infants with no recorded vitamin K had 288.0 bleeding events per 10,000 births against 185.9 among infants who got it; for bleeding inside the skull the figures were 33.0 against 13.2. Adjusted for other differences between the groups, that is 47 per cent more recorded bleeding and 2.4 times for bleeding inside the skull, or one extra bleeding event for every 114 newborns who go without. One analysis covers this year. Truveta Research read 1,026,375 infants born since January 2019 and found 5.2 per cent of January 2026 births with no recorded vitamin K and 8.1 per cent in June 2026, a 57.4 per cent increase. That analysis is a company reporting on its own dataset, not a peer-reviewed study. The American Academy of Pediatrics says in its standing position, updated in June 2026, that babies cannot absorb the oral form very well, so it does not work well to prevent vitamin K deficiency bleeding, and that the shot is the safest and best option for all newborns. Elizabeth Wolf, a pediatrician at Children's Hospital of Richmond and an author of the JAMA Pediatrics study, told Reuters the rise is similar to recent measles outbreaks, calling it a real-world implication of growing mistrust of doctors and public health professionals. The authors also list limits: infants born before 35 weeks were excluded, home births are under-represented, the records cannot show whether a baby received oral drops instead, and bleeding may be written down more readily when vitamin K was not given. Highlights Highlight In pictures Listen The episode as audio