Kennedy Family Scion Pens Heartbreaking Piece On Her Terminal Cancer And RFK Jr’s Danger to Health Care
(AP Photo/Alastair Grant, File)
Tatiana Schlossberg, daughter of Caroline Kennedy Schlossberg and cousin to Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., revealed in a New Yorker article that she has been battling terminal cancer.
Schlossberg wrote that she was diagnosed with acute myeloid leukemia shortly after giving birth to her daughter last year.
Despite rounds of chemotherapy, stem cell transplants, and clinical trials, the journalist and mother of two young children has been given no more than a year to live.
During one clinical trial called a CAR-T treatment, Schlossberg wrote of the sad irony of watching RFK Jr. — “an embarrassment to me and the rest of my immediate family — being confirmed as head of Health and Human Services. She described the ground-breaking treatment as “a method developed over many decades with millions of dollars of government funding” — the same funding that Kennedy has been slashing now that he’s a member of the Trump administration.
“As I spent more and more of my life under the care of doctors, nurses, and researchers striving to improve the lives of others, 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,” she wrote.
Schlossberg continued:
Hundreds of N.I.H. grants and clinical trials were cancelled, affecting thousands of patients. I worried about funding for leukemia and bone-marrow research at Memorial Sloan Kettering. I worried about the trials that were my only shot at remission. 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.
