A shot that costs just a few dollars and takes seconds to administer can prevent a baby from bleeding to death. It has been recommended for every newborn since 1961. The science has been settled for nearly a century.

Babies are still dying without it. And the federal government has never once required anyone to track how many.

Across the country, parents are declining the vitamin K shot for their newborns at alarming rates, often driven by misinformation on social media and unfounded fears about pharmaceutical intervention. A national study of more than 5 million births published in December found that more than 5% of U.S. newborns did not receive vitamin K at birth in 2024, up 77% from 2017. At one Idaho hospital, the refusal rate hit 20%.

The consequences are devastating. Babies who don't receive the vitamin K shot are 81 times more likely to develop late vitamin K deficiency bleeding, a condition in which blood pools around the skull and oxygen cannot reach the brain. According to the CDC, 1 in every 5 babies with vitamin K deficiency bleeding will die.

A 7-week-old boy in Maryland developed sudden seizures. An 11-pound girl in Alabama stopped breathing. A baby in Kentucky went limp after vomiting. A girl in Texas, not yet 2 weeks old, bled around her belly button. None of them survived.

These deaths were preventable. Every one of them.

Yet vitamin K deficiency bleeding has never been designated a nationally reportable condition. The CDC was told years ago it would be too difficult to track. More than a decade later, nothing has changed. Hospitals keep their refusal data in-house. States don't share numbers. The federal government cannot tell you how many babies died last year because their parents skipped a shot that has been standard of care for 65 years.

Making this worse is the silence from the top. When asked directly at a congressional hearing to reassure parents that the vitamin K shot is safe, HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. refused. As Rep. Kim Schrier, a physician, told him: "The doubt you've created about all of medicine and science is causing parents to make dangerous decisions."

She is right. And babies are paying for it with their lives.

Sign this petition to demand the CDC immediately designate vitamin K deficiency bleeding as a nationally notifiable condition, require all birthing hospitals to track and report vitamin K refusals and outcomes, and demand HHS Secretary RFK Jr. issue a clear and unequivocal public endorsement of the vitamin K shot for every newborn.