Famed director — and polio survivor — Francis Ford Coppola is urging new Trump administration public health picks be cautious about vaccine skepticism.
The 75-year-old filmmaker recently revisited his own traumatic experience with the debilitating virus when he was 9 to emphasize the importance of vaccination.
“People don’t understand that polio is a fever that just hits you for one night,” the “Megalopolis” director told Deadline. “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.”
He described being taken to the hospital in 1947 with a fever, and seeing it “crammed with kids” on “gurneys piled up three and four high in the hallways.” After Dr. Jonas Salk and Albert Sabin developed vaccines in 1955, the number of annual cases dropped from 58,000 to 5,600 within two years, and then to just 161 in 1961, according to the World Health Organization.
President-elect Donald Trump has declared his support for the polio vaccine, but his pick of Robert F. Kennedy Jr. as Health and Human Services secretary has raised some concern about Kennedy’s personal lawyer, Aaron Siri, who petitioned the Food and Drug Administration in 2022 to revoke its approval of the polio and hepatitis B vaccines, and to block the distribution of 13 others.
Coppola argued revoking a lifesaving measure makes no sense.
“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,” Coppolatold Deadline, describing how it took months of therapy for his muscles to heal. “It makes it so absurd, the idea that they would consider reversing course on vaccines now.”