The driving forces behind this trend are different but, ultimately, overlap. Some parents who refuse vaccines lump the vitamin K into a blanket “no shots” approach, despite it not being a vaccination (which those children should be getting, anyway). Others—including those anti-shot sources I linked above—fear an increased risk of leukemia based on a single, old study, despite subsequent studies showing no such risk from vitamin K injections. And then there is the fact that the injection simply isn’t “natural.”

I’ve discussed that fascination with “natural” things before. It’s perfectly lovely to want things to be close to nature until one stops to consider that getting infested with scabies or mauled by a grizzly bear are both natural phenomena. The natural outcome for some newborns is to suffer unchecked bleeding due to insufficient clotting factors. Thankfully, there’s an artificial intervention that is safe, cheap, and effective.

In some cases, artificial is better.

It makes me wonder why these parents think we started administering these shots in the first place. Do they imagine we just had a vast surplus of vitamin K lying around, and we figured we might as well inject it into newborns?