Babies Are Bleeding to Death as Parents Reject a Vitamin Shot Given at Birth

bbrendoelfrendo about 2 hours ago 54 commentsRead Article on propublica.org

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ChiperSoft•about 1 hour ago

There is a fantastic episode of Sawbones that goes into how we discovered vitamin K and why doctors started giving it to newborns. It cut infant mortality by a significant amount. I recommend it for anyone who has doubts or who just geeks out over science.

https://maximumfun.org/episodes/sawbones/sawbones-vitamin-k/

8b16380d•about 1 hour ago

social media was a mistake

beardyw•29 minutes ago

No, the mistake is to make spreading misinformation profitable. We then have a vicious cycle where profits feed into politics, and so nothing is done to stop it.

I don't think it will end well.

ASalazarMX•37 minutes ago

Let's hope humanity develops defenses against the easy (even forced) spread of disinformation, hate, ignorance, and mass manipulation if general. Social networks, and the drivers of their owners, caught the world by surprise.

suzzer99•30 minutes ago

I don't think humans will ever have a defense for "trigger my amygdala and tell me what I want to hear."

thefz•35 minutes ago

Before that, giving a pocket computer to everyone was the biggest mistake

fred_is_fred•about 1 hour ago

Speaking as someone with kids, many people I know rejected all of these. The eye ointment that they gloss over is to protect from gonorrhea. Which presumes that everyone having a kid has it in the first place. This is easy to test for before the baby comes though - what about Vitamin K?

ceejayoz•about 1 hour ago

The people who won’t let a kid get ointment aren’t gonna consent to a mandatory STD test either.

(The ointment is also primarily for chlamydia these days.)

brendoelfrendo•about 1 hour ago

Per the article: "All newborns lack vitamin K. No matter how much vitamin K a mother consumes, it doesn’t sufficiently pass through the placenta, and breast milk contains only small amounts." Even vitamin fortified formula may not be enough to provide infants with enough vitamin K to prevent bleeding. The open question in the medical community is not which newborns lack vitamin K (they all do), but why some vitamin K deficient newborns develop bleeding while others don't.

I guess I don't see the point in rejecting the shot. It's a vitamin, it has a clear benefit, and no drawback.

suburban_strike•28 minutes ago

All of our pediatric policy has become iatrogenic in the US. There's a reason our maternal mortality rates are worse than the third world.

Infants are supposed to get vitamin K and other nutrients from breastfeeding, but we push formula.

Vitamin K is supposed to stabilize after a week, but we push booster shots.

Some parents believed the advocacy of actors, and withheld boosters and vaccines-- while feeding their children chemical slop that makes the news every so often after being found contaminated with toxins or deficient in some vital nutrient or mineral, leading to headlines like this.

For maximum hilarity we're putting infants' underdeveloped clotting mechanisms to the test with a battery of injections and performing cosmetic circumcisions just hours after birth.

If the assignment was "come up with a way to maim or kill as many children as possible while maintaining plausible deniability," these are the sorts of subversive pediatric policies I'd suggest. They'll bleed out days or months later, I feign ignorance and avoid attribution, mission accomplished.

Every step of this is handled in the dumbest way conceivable, and if you speak out about it you get blackballed. (Not that this is anything new; they did the same to Semmelweiss, committing him to a mental hospital and beating him to death for suggesting that doctors should wash their hands between surgeries.)

Babylonians/Jews wait until day 8--no sooner, no later--for reasons they could only have discovered through trial-and-error. They perform the same operations and get all the same vaccines we do but Israel's autism rate is 50% lower than the US. Maternal and infant mortality rates are also significantly lower for them. We trade in equipment and cross-train the same practitioners. The only differences are keeping infant nutrition organic/kosher and delaying ritual infant trauma just long enough so that they don't bleed to death in the absence of Vitamin K boosters.

suzzer99•14 minutes ago

> Infants are supposed to get vitamin K and other nutrients from breastfeeding, but we push formula.

This is literally nonsense.

From the article:

> All newborns lack vitamin K. No matter how much vitamin K a mother consumes, it doesn’t sufficiently pass through the placenta, and breast milk contains only small amounts. That puts babies who are exclusively breastfed at a higher risk for vitamin K deficiency bleeding. Formula is fortified with vitamin K, but even with that, experts agree, babies should still get the shot.

ceejayoz•about 2 hours ago

Another case of statistical murder that can't be punished as it should, unfortunately.

baggy_trough•about 2 hours ago

What does 'statistical murder' mean in this case?

golem14•about 1 hour ago

   “Do you understand what I'm saying?" shouted Moist. "You can't just go around killing people!"

   "Why Not? You Do." The golem lowered his arm.

   "What?" snapped Moist. "I do not! Who told you that?"

   "I Worked It Out. You Have Killed Two Point Three Three Eight People," said the golem calmly.

   "I have never laid a finger on anyone in my life, Mr Pump. I may be–– all the things you know I am, but I am not a killer! I have never so much as drawn a sword!"

   "No, You Have Not. But You Have Stolen, Embezzled, Defrauded And Swindled Without Discrimination, Mr Lipvig. You Have Ruined Businesses And Destroyed Jobs. When Banks Fail, It Is Seldom Bankers Who Starve. Your Actions Have Taken Money From Those Who Had Little Enough To Begin With. In A Myriad Small Ways You Have Hastened The Deaths Of Many. You Do Not Know Them. You Did Not See Them Bleed. But You Snatched Bread From Their Mouths And Tore Clothes From Their Backs. For Sport, Mr Lipvig. For Sport. For The Joy Of The Game.”

   ― Terry Pratchett, Going Postal

chowells•about 1 hour ago

It means making an informed choice that you know raises fatality rates.

baggy_trough•about 1 hour ago

Who did that in this case? The parents? Isn't it more likely that they don't believe it raises fatality rates (however incorrectly)?

ceejayoz•about 1 hour ago

It means you’re deliberately killing people, but indirectly enough it can’t be prosecuted.

Fucking with vaccines kills people. Getting rid of USAID kills people. Selling cigarettes kills people. But none of these are crimes. Some of them probably should be.

j16sdiz•about 1 hour ago

It's not the same for an individual choice vs government choice.

Individual different is real. Law of large number is true only for large number. Until you can claim omniscience, I don't think we should make an individual responsible for a "statistical" crime for one individual.

Government policy, on the other hand, ...

cityofdelusion•44 minutes ago

There is no way to have enough nuance for this to actually mean anything. If I drive my child in a small car instead of a massive truck, is this statistical negligence? Or driving at all, very likely the most dangerous thing people do daily. What about the trees outside my home and their hundred pound limbs — if one breaks it will almost certainly be fatal. But many people accept that death is inevitable and minimizing the chance of it isn’t worth doing. Society also speaks out both sides of its mouth — why does an infant refused a vaccine constitute murder but 11 days earlier in the womb its life had no value?

The world has a lot of things it needs to figure out with all this stuff. Blanket statements just aren’t very valuable IMO.

brendoelfrendo•32 minutes ago

It's absolutely fascinating how much of these comments have to do with vaccines when the article is very clearly about a vitamin shot. Wellness culture and influencers have truly broken how we think and talk about medicine.

suzzer99•8 minutes ago

I got in a series of debates over the Covid vaccine on Facebook with a guy I like and respect, who hosts sound baths, promotes psychedelic therapy, and does a bunch of other wellness-related stuff along with his wife. The idea was maybe we could civilly come to some kind of understanding.

We kept it civil. But in the end, I came to the conclusion that being anti-vaxx was a core part of his identity as part of the wellness community, and I was never going to change that.

ceejayoz•23 minutes ago

It’s the same core phenomenon, and the same activists pushing it.