The "Megalopolis" filmmaker responds to vaccine skeptics among the president-elect's cabinet picks, including Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
Responding to mounting concerns that the second Donald Trump administration may limit the use of vaccines after tapping prominent vaccine skeptics like Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to his cabinet, filmmaker Francis Ford Coppola opened up about his childhood experience with polio and the "horror" of spending 10 days isolated in a health ward with "screaming kids."
He said in an interview published Sunday by Deadline that while his physical recovery was slow, "the horror is what I saw [in] a hospital just filled with screaming kids" during his 10-day stay after coming down with the highly infectious virus. That experience "was finally all over because of the wonderful Salk vaccine that happened just two or three years later," Coppola continued.
The idea that the polio vaccine could be rolled back is "so absurd," Coppola said.
Dr. Jonas Salk and Albert Sabin, who developed the vaccine that eradicated polio in the United States and around the world, donated the vaccine's patent to the public "as opposed to what happens today, where the companies own them," Coppola also pointed out.
RFK Jr., Donald Trump's pick to lead the US Department of Health and Human Services, has previously linked vaccines to autism, a myth that has been debunked.
On Tuesday, the politician clarified he supports the polio vaccine, despite reports that his lawyer Aaron Siri asked the government to revoke the vaccine entirely. Siri has assisted Kennedy in choosing candidates for health-related positions in Trump's administration.
"People don't understand that polio is a fever that just hits you for one night," Coppola told Deadine. "You only are sick for one night. The terrible effects of polio, like being unable to breathe so you have to be in an iron lung, or not being able to walk or be totally paralyzed, is the result of the damage of that one night of the infection."
"I remember that night. I was feverish and they took me to a hospital ward. It was so crammed with kids that there were gurneys piled up three and four high in the hallways because there were so many more kids than there were beds in the hospital."
Coppola also remembers children in iron lungs who were "crying for their parents" because they didn't "understand why they were suddenly in these steel cabinets." He added, "And I remember being more frightened for those kids, and not myself, because I was not in one of those things."
The virus paralyzed Coppola, a realization he came to after he fell out of bed while trying to stand up. He spent 10 days in the unit before his parents could take him home.
As he explained, at the time the predominant method of treatment for polio was immobile theory, which largely meant the paralyzed person in question was left in bed and not allowed to move at all. His father rejected the idea and instead went to the March of Dimes for help. The organization connected the family with a doctor who practiced the method developed by the self-trained nurse Elizabeth Kenny.
Instead of not allowing people with polio to move, Kenny focused on retraining the muscles. "They sent to me this wonderful lady, I remember her name, Ms. Wilson. She was an elderly lady with white hair," Coppola added.
"And she would come to see me four days a week and do these very gentle exercises where she'd lift the limbs and what have you. And that lady, over four or five months, gradually brought back my ability to move my left arm. And I'm totally grateful and know the fact that I even can walk today is due to the Sister Kenny system, which was a revolutionary thought at the time."
"To see [polio] go away, there's so many stories about the vaccine, how many lives it saved in an epidemic that was only becoming a bigger epidemic ... It makes it so absurd, the idea that they would consider reversing course on vaccines now," Coppola concluded.