Schlossberg is the second daughter of Edwin Schlossberg and Caroline Kennedy, who served as the US ambassador to Australia from 2022 to 2024.
In her New Yorker essay, Schlossberg criticised the appointment of her cousin Robert F. Kennedy Jr. as US secretary of health and human services in the Trump administration for being a vaccine sceptic and cutting funding for cancer research.
Schlossberg, second right, pauses for a moment of silence during a ceremony at a JFK memorial in England in 2013.Credit: AP
“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,” she wrote.
Schlossberg wrote that his decisions threatened her own survival and that of “millions of cancer survivors, small children, and the elderly”.
“I watched as Bobby cut nearly half a 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,” she wrote.
Robert F. Kennedy Jr. had previously run for US president as an independent, which Schlossberg called “an embarrassment to me and the rest of my immediate family”.
Tragedy has followed the Kennedy family since John F. Kennedy was assassinated in 1963. His brother, Bobby, was shot while campaigning in 1968. JFK’s son, John F. Kennedy Jr, died in a plane crash in 1999 that also killed his wife, Carolyn Bessette Kennedy.
Reuters
