The granddaughter of JFK has criticised her cousin, US Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jnr, for his “vaccine scepticism” as she revealed she has terminal blood cancer.
Tatiana Schlossberg, 35, is the granddaughter of former President John F. Kennedy and Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis through her mother Caroline, the couple’s last surviving child. An environmental journalist and mother of two, Schlossberg was diagnosed with myeloid leukaemia shortly after giving birth to her daughter in May last year.
Writing in the New Yorker on the 62nd anniversary of her grandfather’s assassination, she described her alarm as her cousin “cut nearly a half billion dollars for research into mRNA vaccines” and withdrew “billions in funding from the National Institutes of Health, the world’s largest sponsor of medical research”.
She said: “Bobby is a known sceptic 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.
“Bobby has said, ‘There’s no vaccine that is safe and effective.’ Bobby probably doesn’t remember the millions of people who were paralyzed or killed by polio before the vaccine was available.”
Schlossberg said she “froze” at the thought of treatment drugs being withdrawn under the administration. She wrote: “Early in my illness, when I had the postpartum haemorrhage, 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.”
She also reflected on her father Edwin Schlossberg, 80, describing his childhood in New York in the 1940s and 50s and the sense of “freedom” he remembered when vaccines first arrived.
Schlossberg said she began feeling healthy in May 2024 when a doctor spotted her “strange” white blood cell count. She was told she could have around 12 months to live while undergoing a clinical trial.
She wrote: “My first thought was that my kids, whose faces live permanently on the inside of my eyelids, wouldn’t remember me. My son might have a few memories, but he’ll probably start confusing them with pictures he sees or stories he hears.
“I didn’t ever really get to take care of my daughter—I couldn’t change her diaper or give her a bath or feed her, all because of the risk of infection after my transplants. I was gone for almost half of her first year of life. I don’t know who, really, she thinks I am, and whether she will feel or remember, when I am gone, that I am her mother.”
She said she has been cared for by her siblings — sister Rose, 37, and brother Jack, 32 — who recently announced plans to run for Congress.
Myeloid leukaemia is a form of cancer that develops from immature white blood cells in the bone marrow. It is most common in older adults but can affect people of any age. Symptoms include fatigue, fever, breathlessness, bruising and bleeding easily, and weight loss.
