Francis Ford Coppola slams ‘absurd’ idea Trump would ‘reverse course’ on vaccines, recalls ‘horror’ of 10-day polio ward stay
In response to growing concerns that the second Donald Trump administration may restrict the use of vaccines after beating prominent vaccine skeptics such as 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 in isolation in a health ward with “screaming children”.
He said in an interview published on Sunday Deadline that while his physical recovery was slow, “the horror is what I saw (in) a hospital that was just full of screaming children” during his 10-day stay after contracting the highly contagious virus. That experience “was finally 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 “unlike 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 supports the polio vaccinedespite reports that his lawyer Aaron Siri asked the government to withdraw the vaccine entirely. Siri has helped Kennedy select candidates for health-related positions in the Trump administration.
“People don’t understand that polio is a fever that just hits you for one night,” Coppola told Deadine. “You’re only sick for one night. The terrible effects of polio, like not being able to breathe so you have to be in an iron lung, or not being able to walk or being totally paralyzed, are the result of the damage from the one night of the infection.”
“I remember that night. I had a fever and they took me to a hospital ward. It was so packed with children that there were stretchers stacked three and four high in the corridors because there were so many more children than there were beds at the hospital.”
Coppola also recalls children in iron lungs “crying for their parents” because they didn’t “understand why they were suddenly in these steel lockers.” He added: “And I remember being more scared of those kids and not myself because I wasn’t in one of those things.”
The virus paralyzed Coppola, a realization he came to after he fell out of bed while trying to get up. He spent 10 days in the ward before his parents could take him home.
As he explained, the prevailing method of treating polio at the time was the immobile theory, which largely meant that the paralytic 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 self-trained nurse Elizabeth Kenny.
Instead of not letting people with polio move, Kenny focused on retraining the muscles. “They sent me this wonderful lady, I remember her name, Ms. Wilson. She was an older lady with white hair,” Coppola added.
“And she came to see me four days a week and did these very gentle exercises where she lifted 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 am completely grateful and know that the fact that I can walk at all today is because of the Sister Kenny system, which was a revolutionary thought at the time.”
“To see (polio) go away, there are 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.
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