Babies are dying from a preventable condition; ProPublica's Duaa Eldeib wins the June Sidney for exposing the crisis
NEW YORK — Healthy newborns are hemorrhaging to death in the weeks after birth — and the deaths are almost entirely preventable. The Sidney Hillman Foundation’s June Sidney Award goes to Duaa Eldeib of ProPublica for her investigation into a rising wave of infant deaths from vitamin K deficiency bleeding, driven by parents who have been misled into refusing a simple, decades-old shot given at birth.
Eldeib’s reporting documents how babies are suffering catastrophic whole-body bleeding — including fatal brain hemorrhages — at growing rates. A 7-week-old boy in Maryland had sudden seizures. An 11-pound girl in Alabama stopped breathing. A baby in Kentucky went limp. In case after case, autopsies reached the same conclusion: the deaths were caused, in whole or in part, by vitamin K deficiency bleeding. In almost every case, a single injection at birth would have saved the child’s life.
The vitamin K shot has been standard newborn care since 1961. Babies are not born with sufficient vitamin K to guarantee healthy blood clotting — the nutrient does not pass efficiently through the placenta or breast milk — and without the shot, they are 81 times more likely to suffer life-threatening bleeding than babies who receive it. Yet a national study published in December found that the rate of newborns not receiving the shot jumped 77% between 2017 and 2024, swept up in the same tide of vaccine hesitancy and anti-medicine misinformation that has driven declines in measles and whooping cough immunizations. One Midwestern hospital network has seen refusals triple since 2021. More than 5% of U.S. newborns did not receive a vitamin K shot in 2024.
The federal government keeps no national statistics on how many babies die of vitamin K deficiency. Eldeib went looking for the numbers herself: she contacted 55 hospitals and birthing centers, conducted more than 30 doctor interviews and filed nearly 90 public records requests with state health departments, medical examiners and other agencies. She analyzed hundreds of pages of autopsy records. Doctors told her that hundreds of babies die each year from spontaneous brain bleeding and that many of those deaths — likely related to vitamin K deficiency — go uncounted and unchallenged.
“Eldeib’s dogged reporting has exposed a preventable threat to newborn babies,” said Sidney judge Lindsay Beyerstein. “Quacks are tricking parents into rejecting lifesaving preventive care for their babies — and without reporting like this, most Americans would have no idea it’s happening.”
At a recent U.S. House subcommittee hearing, Rep. Kim Schrier (D-WA) — herself a physician — pressed Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to reassure parents that the vitamin K shot is safe. He refused.
“I’ve never said, literally never said, anything about it,” Kennedy told the committee.
“That’s exactly the point,” Schrier replied. “You don’t say anything about it, but the doubt you’ve created about all of medicine and science is causing parents to make dangerous decisions.” [Source here.]
Duaa Eldeib is a reporter at ProPublica who covers health care and has been named a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize multiple times. She centers human stories in her reporting and weaves together accountability with the narratives of those who were harmed.
Backstory
Q: Why do doctors recommend the vitamin K shot for newborns?
A: Doctors have called the vitamin K shot one of the most effective preventative measures for newborns. They need it because they are not born with enough vitamin K in their system, and they need vitamin K to help their blood clot. Doctors have recommended since 1961 that all babies get a vitamin K shot at birth.
Q: What happens if babies don’t have enough vitamin K in their system?
A: They can start bleeding uncontrollably and that’s the really scary thing. What we don’t know is why some babies don’t get the vitamin K shot and they’re fine, and other babies who don’t get it end up bleeding uncontrollably. They can start bleeding in their intestines, they can start bleeding in their brain, and in some cases they can even die.
Q: How did you become aware that more and more parents were refusing the shot?
A: I was interviewing a doctor for an unrelated story and he mentioned that he was seeing an increase in families declining the vitamin K shot and he was really concerned. When he said that there have been cases of babies dying because they didn’t get the vitamin K shot, I stopped everything that I was doing and I said, I need to report this story now.
Q: Vitamin K is an essential nutrient that’s found in healthy foods like kale and avocados. You would think that alternative health types would be really into vitamins. What’s the sticking point that’s making people refuse it for their kids?
A: I think that there is this feeling that it’s not necessary because there are people who have had babies who didn’t get it and they were fine so there’s this belief that it’s unnecessary. There’s also a lot of false and misleading information online. Parents, especially new parents, when you have a baby, a fragile little human being, you want to do what is best for them and you’re being told that giving them this shot could put them in danger, so there are parents who say, you know what, I’m just going to err on the side of caution, I don’t want to put my baby at risk. They think that they are doing what is best for their baby without realizing that not getting the shot actually can increase their chances of vitamin K deficiency bleeding.
Q: What has been Secretary of Health and Human Services RFK, Jr.’s attitude towards the shot?
A: He has not said anything publicly about the shot. He was asked about it at a hearing recently by a member of Congress to go on the record and make a statement about the shot and he wouldn’t. He said, look, I’ve said nothing about the shot. I’ve said nothing about the shot. There have been calls for him to come out and make a statement about the shot, but he has not.
Q: There’s very little data on vitamin K deficiency in newborns. How did you go about uncovering the stories of these babies?
A: I was surprised to learn that there is not really good data around this issue when I first heard about it. The first thing I did was I went to state health departments to get data on how many cases they’ve had, what their vitamin K administration rates have been, how many babies are getting it, and how many families are declining it. And they didn’t have the data. They’re like, this is not something that is required to be reported and so we don’t have the data. So I had to then go individually and look at whatever was available from state data, CDC data, and then I had to go individually to certain counties and states and try to get autopsy reports, and that’s how I was able to piece together the stories of what happened to these babies.
Q: What’s it like to look at an autopsy report of a baby that died in its first weeks of life because of this?
A: It’s heartbreaking. I’m a mother. I have kids and there’s just something about reading a baby’s autopsy report that’s just always so difficult. Some of these reports are really matter of fact and straightforward that the cause of death was vitamin K deficiency bleeding. That the death happened at this date and this time. And others go into a lot more detail. They have summaries and they have narratives and they talk about the extent to which the doctors tried to save the babies and they talk about everything that they did, the medical interventions, to really try and to stop the bleeding and ultimately that they were unsuccessful. That’s just heartbreaking to read.
Q: You’ve talked to some parents whose babies died because they refused the shot. Did any of them express remorse or regret about their decision?
A: A lot of the parents were, as expected, just absolutely devastated. These are parents who loved their babies very, very much and never in a million years thought that their decision could lead to this. Some of the families were just too heartbroken to even acknowledge what happened. Some families are still in denial and don’t believe that it was the lack of the vitamin K shot that led to the death, even though that’s what the autopsy reports. Instead, they blamed other things. They blamed the hospital, they blamed not being able to clamp the cord, other factors, without really saying it was the vitamin K shot.
Q: About five percent of U.S. newborns are going without the shot now. How many additional deaths per year could we be looking at compared to a world in which everybody got the shot?
A: The straight answer is we don’t know. I think that’s what’s so difficult about the data and why the doctors that I talked to have really called for more and better complete data around this issue. What is being reported now to the CDC, what they are tracking through death certificate data is a very small number we’re talking about - four or five, six, seven deaths a year. But everyone acknowledges that number is incomplete. The experts that I talked to said we could be talking about significantly more deaths every year, we just don’t know because the data is so bad.
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