“Battle with my blood”. In a long column published on Saturday November 22 in New YorkerTatiana Schlossberg, environmental journalist and granddaughter of John F. Kennedy, reveals that she suffers from terminal acute myeloid leukemia. In this heartbreaking text, the 35-year-old recounts the last eighteen months of her life, from the announcement of her illness to the arduous treatment she underwent, while criticizing one of her family members: her great-grand cousin, Robert Kennedy Jr., the current Secretary of Health in the United States. “When I was diagnosed with leukemia, my first thought was that this couldn’t possibly happen to me, to my family,” he conveyed, admitting so “dying”.
After the assassination of his grandfather, the country’s former president, and his great uncle, United States Attorney General Robert Francis Kennedy, the journalist felt he had to add “a new tragedy (…) in (his) family life”. In his essay, he talks at length about his medical treatments: chemotherapy, bone marrow transplants, his participation in clinical trials… to no avail. “In the last clinical trial, my doctor told me it could probably keep me alive for a year,” he shared.
Despite the criticism, Tatiana Schlossberg took time, in several paragraphs, to condemn the actions of the Minister of Health, Robert Kennedy Jr., who was appointed by Donald Trump in November 2024. “From my hospital bed, I watched helplessly as Bobby was confirmed in this position, against all logic and common sense, even though he had never worked in medicine, public health, or government,” he said, adding: “Suddenly, the health system I relied on looked fragile.”
People treated by doctors at Columbia University’s dependent health center saw the stance “one of the Trump administration’s first targets”. His big cousin became so “a source of embarrassment for me and my immediate family”, he admitted, he was afraid of budget cuts for his future treatment. Tatiana Schlossberg continued: “Bobby’s skepticism towards vaccines is common knowledge, and I am very worried that I will not be able to get another vaccination, which will result in me spending the rest of my life with a weakened immune system.”
He then mentioned a number of budget reductions for mRNA vaccine research, for the National Institutes of Health (NIH), and a number of drugs getting reprieves: “At the beginning of my illness, (…) I was given a dose of misoprostol (…). I was paralyzed when I thought about what would happen if this treatment was not immediately available to me.”
Sensitive to the environment and protecting the planet, Tatiana Schlossberg knows about one of her remedies, cytarabine, which she says comes from sea sponges. “This discovery was made by scientists at the University of California, Berkeley, who first synthesized the drug in 1959, and almost certainly benefited from public funding, precisely the funding that Bobby had cut.” he taunted.
“If I weren’t sick, I’d plan to write a book about the oceans (…). I wouldn’t write about cytarabine. I’ll never know whether we managed to save the oceans, or let them boil down to landfill.”. Before ending with his children, whom he promised to remember, even after his death.
