Headlines warning that babies are “bleeding to death” because parents are refusing vitamin K shots at birth aren’t telling the whole story, according to physician and researcher Dr. Suzanne Humphries.
Speaking this week on CHD.TV’s “Good Morning CHD,” Humphries said media coverage of the issue relies heavily on fear while downplaying information parents need to make informed decisions.
Humphries cited a recent ProPublica article that claimed “hundreds of children die each year” from brain bleeding, which the publication linked to vitamin K deficiency.
Humphries disputed whether low vitamin K levels are the underlying cause in many of those cases.
Citing older European data collected before routine vitamin K injections became standard, Humphries said deaths from brain bleeds associated with vitamin K deficiency occurred at a rate of approximately 0.26 to 0.9 per 100,000 births.
“Put that into perspective and decide if you want to have this injection put into your baby,” Humphries said. “There is no such thing as zero risk.”
Breast milk deemed ‘innately deficient substance that puts your baby at risk’
According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), vitamin K helps blood clot normally, and babies are born with naturally low levels of the nutrient. In some cases, this can lead to vitamin K deficiency bleeding.
The CDC says most cases occur during the first week of life and are often linked to maternal medications that interfere with vitamin K metabolism. Symptoms are typically minor and can include bruising and bleeding around the umbilical cord.
The rarer, late-onset form — which may lead to intracranial bleeding — occurs in an estimated 4 to 7 infants per 100,000, according to Humphries.
The CDC says late-onset cases tend to occur in infants who did not receive the vitamin K shot and are exclusively breastfed, because breast milk contains low levels of vitamin K.
Humphries criticized the implication that breast milk itself is inadequate.
“We’re often told that it happens in exclusively breastfed infants, as if breast milk is just like this innately deficient substance that puts your baby at risk,” Humphries said. “And so if you say you’re going to breastfeed 100% and prolong breastfeeding, that’s when they’ll be chasing you around with a syringe.”
Shot includes benzyl alcohol, which FDA said ‘should be discontinued’ in 1982
The CDC recommends that all newborns receive an intramuscular vitamin K injection shortly after birth, typically within hours of delivery.
Humphries said parents who question the shot are often dismissed rather than given complete information about the product and the available evidence.
She raised concerns about one of the ingredients in some vitamin K shots — benzyl alcohol, a preservative linked to “gasping syndrome” and infant deaths.
In 1982, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) recommended that benzyl alcohol “should be discontinued” in neonatal products. However, the CDC website still lists it as a preservative in some vitamin K products, but says the amount used is too small to pose a danger.
Humphries also addressed concerns about aluminum exposure, saying the amount used is low compared with vaccines, but “it’s not zero.”
‘We don’t have safety studies’ on vitamin K shot
Parents are frequently told there are “no safety concerns” surrounding the vitamin K shot, Humphries said.
But the long-term studies examining outcomes related to neurodevelopment, fertility and cancer risk have never been conducted, she said, citing FDA labeling information.
“We don’t have safety studies that can assure us that there’s going to be no long-term problems,” she said.
Humphries noted two British studies that suggested a possible link between injectable vitamin K and childhood cancer:
- A 1990 paper published in the British Journal of Cancer reported a statistical association between neonatal drug exposure — including vitamin K — and later childhood cancer. Humphries acknowledged the study was exploratory and did not prove causation, but said it prompted additional research.
- In 1992, epidemiologist Jean Golding co-published a follow-up case-control study that found nearly double the odds of childhood cancer among children who received the intramuscular vitamin K shot. The study did not find the same association with oral vitamin K.
Later studies dismissing Golding’s findings may have been confounded by the dramatic expansion of vaccines given to infants today, Humphries said.
“Back in the day that Golding looked at this … there was no vaccine given at birth.” Today, “babies are bombarded” with medical interventions at birth.
Any signal identified decades ago “would be very much blurred out by all the other insults that are added to the equation in terms of birthing in today’s world,” she said.
Referring to Golding’s paper, Humphries said, “Everybody should have a copy of this, and it should be read and considered in conjunction with everything else that you might be told.”
Low vitamin K levels may be ‘by design’ and ‘not actually a mistake’
Humphries also suggested that naturally low vitamin K levels at birth may serve a biological purpose rather than represent a defect requiring routine intervention.
The Golding paper itself noted that “a relative deficiency in vitamin K during this critical phase of rapid growth and development may protect vulnerable tissues from mutagenesis.”
Humphries connected that theory to the major circulatory changes that occur immediately after birth as a newborn transitions from fetal circulation and takes its first breaths.
“If you’ve got a clot in that system, it could be absolutely devastating for that baby,” she said.
Perhaps the low vitamin K level at birth “is by design and that there’s a reason for it and it’s not actually a mistake that humans need to put their hand in, and alter every single newborn,” Humphries said.
Watch Humphries on ‘Good Morning CHD’ here:
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