Francis Ford Coppola says it's absurd to reverse course on vaccines after recalling harrowing details of his Polio diagnosis

Francis Ford Coppola is opposed to the idea that President Donald Trump would "reverse course" on vaccines, opening up about his childhood experience with polio. Responding to the increasing concerns that the second Trump administration may limit the use of vaccines as vax skeptics like Robert F. Kennedy Jr. take the post, Coppola told Deadline in an interview published on Sunday, December 22:

"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."

Francis Ford Coppola's comment comes after the increasing chatter about Donald Trump's views about vaccines. MSNBC reported on December 18 about Trump's long-held musings about vaccines, including that he reportedly cast doubt on the efficacy of flu vaccines in 2015 before he even won his first presidency. The same article quoted Trump's comments about possibly opposing school vaccination mandates during a recent news conference because he's "not a big mandate person."

Moreover, NPR reported on December 6 that Trump nominating RFK Jr, who is reportedly an anti-vaccine activist, as the country's top health official could "cause renewed, deadly epidemics of measles, whooping cough, and meningitis, or even polio." That said, RFK Jr. said on December 16, per CNN, that he was "all for" the polio vaccine, but his history of vaccine skepticism has already caused a stir.

Speaking of polio, Francis Ford Coppola had been diagnosed with it as a child. A Global Citizen article, published in December 2015, quoted the Hollywood director talking about receiving news that he had polio when he was nine years old in 1994. His comments about reversing course on vaccines being "so absurd" come from his experience of polio, which he told Deadline was a "horror," but that it was thankfully over when the "wonderful Salk vaccine" arrived.

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Francis Ford Coppola recalls his experience being diagnosed with polio as a child

During his interview with Deadline published on December 22, Francis Ford Coppola described how debilitating the effects of polio are despite only being sick for one night. He said:

"People don't understand that polio is a fever that just hits you for one night. 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 infection."

He also described the experience he had at the hospital after being diagnosed with polio as a child. He further said:

"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 that there were beds in the hospital."

The Megalopolis director also recalled seeing kids in the iron lungs crying for their parents and confused about why they had to be kept inside steel cabinets. He said that he didn't have to be in an iron lung, but seeing other kids inside those things made him frightened for them. That said, Francis Ford Coppola's polio experience was no less scary, which he further recalled:

"I was looking around, and then when I tried to get out of bed, I fell on the floor and I realized I couldn't walk. I couldn't get up. And I stayed in that ward for about 10 days before, finally, my parents were able to take me home."

During the same interview, Francis Ford Coppola also mentioned that the doctors who developed the Salk vaccine for polio, Dr. Jonas Salk and Albert Sabin, donated the vaccine patents to the public. He said that it's not the same thing today because, now, companies own the patents of their vaccines.