Tatiana Schlossberg Slams Cousin RFK Jr. in Emotional Essay About Terminal Cancer

Tatiana Schlossberg took aim at her cousin, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., speaking about how his controversial agenda as secretary of health and human services has impacted her terminal cancer diagnosis.

In an essay published by The New Yorker on Saturday, Nov. 22, the 35-year-old daughter of Caroline Kennedy and Edwin Schlossberg revealed that she has been diagnosed with acute myeloid leukemia. Schlossberg received an official diagnosis shortly after her second child with husband George Moran was born in May 2024, and she has been receiving treatment since.

Toward the end of her New Yorker essay, as she recounted her most recent treatments, she criticized RFK Jr.’s agenda as health secretary. In particular, Schlossberg offered scathing criticism of his anti-vaccine stances and decision to defund various medical research, as well as the harmful effects the actions can have on those receiving care similar to her own.

“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.”

Next, she recounted how, in August 2024, RFK Jr., 71, suspended his own presidential campaign and endorsed Donald Trump, “Who said that he was going to ‘let Bobby go wild’ on health.”

“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,” wrote Schlossberg. “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.”

“Suddenly, the health-care system on which I relied felt strained, shaky,” she continued. “Doctors and scientists at Columbia, including George, didn’t know if they would be able to continue their research, or even have jobs. (Columbia was one of the Trump Administration’s first targets in its crusade against alleged antisemitism on campuses; in May, the university laid off a hundred and eighty researchers after federal-funding cuts.).”

Referring to her husband, a doctor, she added, “If George changed jobs, we didn’t know if we’d be able to get insurance, now that I had a preexisting condition.”

Schlossberg then explained how her cousin’s anti-vaccine stances could affect her as she continues to receive treatment for acute myeloid leukemia.

“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, citing the health secretary’s past comment that “there’s no vaccine that is safe and effective.” 

Her cousin, she added, “probably doesn’t remember the millions of people who were paralyzed or killed by polio before the vaccine was available. 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.”

As Schlossberg spent more of her life “under the care of doctors, nurses, and researchers striving to improve the lives of others,” she wrote, “I watched as Bobby cut nearly a half billion dollars for research into mRNA vaccines, technology that could be used against certain cancers; slashed billions in funding from the National Institutes of Health, the world’s largest sponsor of medical research; and threatened to oust the panel of medical experts charged with recommending preventive cancer screenings.”

Grants and trials were canceled, “affecting thousands of patients,” she said, also adding that she was “worried about funding for leukemia and bone-marrow research at Memorial Sloan Kettering,” where she had been transferred.

“I worried about the trials that were my only shot at remission,” said Schlossberg. “Early in my illness, when I had the postpartum hemorrhage, I was given a dose of misoprostol to help stop the bleeding. This drug is part of medication abortion, which, at Bobby’s urging, is currently ‘under review’ by the Food and Drug Administration. 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.”

For her final comment on RFK Jr. in the New Yorker essay, Schlossberg explained that her “plan, had I not gotten sick, was to write a book about the oceans — their destruction, but also the possibilities they offer.”

This included “one of my chemotherapy drugs, cytarabine,” which she wrote “owes its existence to an ocean animal: a sponge that lives in the Caribbean Sea,” a discovery made thanks to government funding — “the very thing that Bobby has already cut.”

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Schlossberg’s criticism of cousin RFK Jr. comes just one day after another family member wrote a scathing takedown of Trump’s health secretary.

The politician’s younger brother, Maxwell Taylor Kennedy, wrote that RFK Jr. is “betraying” their father Robert F. Kennedy’s legacy in an op-ed for the Boston Globe that was published on Nov. 21.