Environmental journalist Tatiana Schlossberg, the daughter of Caroline Kennedy, announced in an essay published Saturday that she has been diagnosed with an incurable form of acute myeloid leukemia. She was diagnosed at age 34, after a routine blood draw performed following the May 2024 birth of her daughter revealed unusual results. Writing for the New Yorker, she says that in the months since, she’s undergone chemotherapy, a bone-marrow transplant, stem cell treatment, and a clinical trial for a new form of immunotherapy—many of these the result of federally supported cancer research, which her second cousin, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., slashed following his confirmation earlier this year.
As Vanity Fair and others have reported, RFK Jr. lost the support of his family as he campaigned against vaccines and for president last year. As Joe Hagan reported for VF in 2024, his siblings were “furious” and “heartbroken” over his candidacy. Following the presidential election, his sister Caroline Kennedy, who has long shied away from public discussion of family matters, penned a damning letter to the Senate opposing his confirmation as the head of the US Department of Health and Human Services.
According to a paper published last week in the JAMA Internal Medicine journal, RFK Jr. oversaw funding cuts to the National Institutes of Health that shut down nearly 1 out of every 30 clinical trials currently underway, many involving cancer treatments. In his role as HHS head, RFK Jr. has also expressed interest in firing the entire United States Preventive Services Task Force—a panel that advocates for cancer screenings—for being “too woke,” reports ABC News. And perhaps most significantly, the longtime vaccine critic announced in August that all mRNA vaccine development would cease, even though they are widely believed to be the next frontier in eradicating a multitude of chronic and fatal diseases, including cancer.
In an August op-ed for the Utah News Dispatch cancer survivor and physician Brian Moench took Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to task, saying he is “slamming the door on the survival chances of millions of cancer victims.” One of those people, Natalie Phelps, tells CBS News that her participation in a clinical trial for treatment of Stage 4 metastatic colorectal cancer has been delayed due to the cuts. “I have endured so much, and now I have another hurdle just because of funding cuts?” Phelps says. “When is cancer political?”
It’s not just cancer that’s become politicized under Kennedy. The HHS head has also opposed use of anti-depressants, falsely claiming that their use has been linked to school shootings. He fired all the members of the CDC’s Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices in June, and last week told the New York Times that he “he personally instructed the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to abandon its longstanding position that vaccines do not cause autism,” infuriating doctors including Republican Louisiana Senator Bill Cassidy, who voted to confirm RFK Jr. as HHS head only after Kennedy said he would not remove language from the CDC website debunking the disproven link between vaccinations and the disorder. Meanwhile, he’s continued to publicly misrepresent chronic disease rates in the US and oversaw mass firings at the FDA of experts tasked with the regulation of food and drug companies.
