Some doctors failed to recognize the role of vitamin K when a baby came into their emergency rooms, let alone knew how to reverse the damage from the declined shots. Many of them encountered the condition only in medical school textbooks.

Some hospitals have started to run their own numbers, but the effort is scattershot. The data is also usually kept in house, so there’s not a wider knowledge of the problem. Recognizing the urgency of the matter, officials at a handful of hospitals agreed to share their data with ProPublica.

Doctors at St. Louis-based Mercy, which runs birthing hospitals in Missouri, Kansas, Oklahoma, and Arkansas, began noticing an uptick in families turning down the vitamin K shot during the pandemic. Last year, 1,552 babies across all Mercy hospitals didn’t get the injection. In 2021, that number was 536.

And at Idaho’s largest hospital system, the refusal rates have gone up every year since the start of the pandemic, and in some cases have more than doubled. In 2020, 3.8 percent of families across St. Luke’s Health System declined the vitamin K shot for their babies. In 2025, that figure jumped to 9.8 percent. One hospital even reached 20 percent of babies not getting vitamin K shots.

At least two babies treated at St. Luke’s died within the last year from complications related to vitamin K deficiency bleeding, hospital officials confirmed. But Dr. Tom Patterson, a pediatrician who treats newborns at some St. Luke’s hospitals and is among the most vocal in warning about the climbing refusal rates, suspects there may be more.

Patterson recently pleaded with a family to allow their baby to get the shot. The father refused and shocked the doctor by going even further. He approached the nurses to complain about Patterson pushing the matter.

How we reported this story

As part of our reporting, ProPublica contacted 55 hospitals and birthing centers around the US; interviewed more than 30 doctors; and filed nearly 90 public records requests with state and local health departments, medical examiners, and other agencies. ProPublica also analyzed data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and examined hundreds of pages of medical and autopsy records.

This story originally appeared on ProPublica.