RFK Jr.’s health legacy now hurts his cousin Tatiana Schlossberg, who has been diagnosed with terminal cancer

New York, NY – Tatiana Schlossberg, the 35-year-old daughter of Caroline Kennedy and granddaughter of President John F. Kennedy, has penned a deeply personal and politically charged essay for The New Yorker revealing her diagnosis with acute myeloid leukemia and lambasting her cousin, Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., for policies that she says are jeopardizing her treatment and the broader fight against cancer.

Published on November 22, the piece details Schlossberg’s journey since receiving her official diagnosis shortly after the birth of her second child with husband George Moran in May 2024. She has been undergoing treatment ever since, including CAR-T therapy—a cutting-edge method developed over decades with millions in government funding.

The essay weaves Schlossberg’s medical ordeal with a searing critique of RFK Jr.’s agenda, particularly his skepticism of vaccines, defunding of medical research, and threats to essential drugs.

“During the CAR-T treatment, a method developed over many decades with millions of dollars of government funding, my cousin, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., was in the process of being nominated and confirmed as the secretary of health and human services,” she wrote.

“Throughout my treatment, he had been on the national stage: previously a Democrat, he was running for President as an Independent, but mostly as an embarrassment to me and the rest of my immediate family.”

From Campaign Chaos to Confirmation Nightmare

Schlossberg recounted how, in August 2024, RFK Jr., 71, suspended his presidential bid and endorsed Donald Trump, who promised to “let Bobby go wild” on health policy.

“My mother wrote a letter to the Senate, to try and stop his confirmation; my brother [Jack Schlossberg] had been speaking out against his lies for months,” she wrote. “I watched from my hospital bed as Bobby, in the face of logic and common sense, was confirmed for the position, despite never having worked in medicine, public health, or the government.”

The confirmation, she said, left the healthcare system she relied on “strained, shaky.” Her husband George, a doctor at Columbia University, worried about job security as the Trump administration targeted the institution over alleged antisemitism, leading to 180 research layoffs in May after federal funding cuts.

“If George changed jobs, we didn’t know if we’d be able to get insurance, now that I had a preexisting condition,” Schlossberg wrote.

Schlossberg expressed particular dread over RFK Jr.’s anti-vaccine stance, quoting his past comment that “there’s no vaccine that is safe and effective.”

“Bobby is a known skeptic of vaccines, and I was especially concerned that I wouldn’t be able to get mine again, leaving me to spend the rest of my life immunocompromised, along with millions of cancer survivors, small children, and the elderly,” she wrote. She contrasted this with her father Edwin Schlossberg’s memories of the polio vaccine: “My dad, who grew up in New York City in the nineteen-forties and fifties, does remember. Recently, I asked him what it was like when he got the vaccine. He said that it felt like freedom.”

RFK Jr.’s actions as HHS secretary—cutting nearly $500 million for mRNA vaccine research (potentially useful against cancers), slashing billions from the National Institutes of Health (NIH), the world’s largest medical research sponsor, and threatening to oust the panel recommending preventive cancer screenings—have directly threatened Schlossberg’s care.

“Grants and trials were canceled, affecting thousands of patients,” she wrote. She worried about leukemia and bone-marrow research at Memorial Sloan Kettering, where she was transferred: “I worried about the trials that were my only shot at remission.”

During a postpartum hemorrhage after her second child’s birth, Schlossberg received misoprostol—a drug under FDA “review” at RFK Jr.’s urging, which is also used for medication abortion.

“I freeze when I think about what would have happened if it had not been immediately available to me and to millions of other women who need it to save their lives or to get the care they deserve,” she said.

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Schlossberg’s essay arrives one day after her uncle, Maxwell Taylor Kennedy, penned a Boston Globe op-ed, accusing RFK Jr. of “betraying” their father Robert F. Kennedy’s legacy through anti-vaccine activism and Trump alignment.

The Schlossberg piece reflects on her interrupted career: “My plan, had I not gotten sick, was to write a book about the oceans—their destruction, but also the possibilities they offer.”

One of her chemotherapy drugs, cytarabine, derives from a Caribbean Sea sponge, discovered thanks to government funding—“the very thing that Bobby has already cut.”