Tatiana Schlossberg, 35, President John F. Kennedy’s granddaughter, publicly tore into her cousin Robert F. Kennedy Jr. in a harrowing essay revealing her fight with terminal cancer.
Schlossberg disclosed she was diagnosed with acute myeloid leukemia in May 2024, a rare and aggressive form of blood cancer.
Doctors caught it through routine blood work after the birth of her second child. She began CAR-T therapy, a treatment developed with decades of government-funded research.
Writing in the New Yorker on the 62nd anniversary of JFK’s assassination, Schlossberg didn’t hold back. She slammed RFK Jr. as “mostly an embarrassment to me and the rest of my immediate family” as she battled the disease.
She said she watched from her hospital bed as he was confirmed as Secretary of Health and Human Services in February 2025 despite lacking experience in medicine, public health, or government.
Schlossberg accused RFK Jr. of slashing billions from the National Institutes of Health, canceling grants and clinical trials, and cutting nearly half a billion dollars in mRNA vaccine research—technology she noted could help fight cancer.
“The health-care system I relied on suddenly felt strained, shaky,” she wrote. She feared losing access to leukemia and bone marrow trials at Memorial Sloan Kettering.
Her criticism extended to his anti-vaccine stance, the Daily Mail reported.
Quoting him, she wrote, “‘There’s no vaccine that is safe and effective.’”
Schlossberg contrasted that with her father’s memory of the polio vaccine, which he described as “freedom.”
As an immunocompromised patient, she worried she might never be able to receive vaccines again, leaving her vulnerable “along with millions of cancer survivors, small children, and the elderly.”
Schlossberg also slammed RFK Jr. for trying to block misoprostol, a drug that saved her life during a postpartum hemorrhage. “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,” she wrote.
Her essay detailed the personal toll of her illness. She said cancer derailed plans to write a book about the oceans and noted the irony that one of her chemotherapy drugs, cytarabine, was derived from a Caribbean sponge discovered through government-funded research—the very funding RFK Jr. had cut.
She reflected on her role as a mother and writer: “I remind my son that I am a writer, so that he will know that I was not just a sick person.”
The essay also touched on politics. Schlossberg said her mother lobbied the Senate to block RFK Jr.’s confirmation, and her brother had spoken out against his “lies for months.”
She tied his rise to Trump’s administration, noting that RFK Jr. had suspended his 2024 presidential campaign and endorsed Trump, who “vowed to let Bobby go wild” on health policy.
Schlossberg’s public revelation combines a deeply personal medical struggle with a scathing critique of a family member who now holds enormous power over the country’s health system.
Her essay paints RFK Jr. as an incompetent leader whose decisions directly threatened the care of patients like her—and millions of Americans relying on vaccines and advanced medical research.
