Responding to growing concerns that Donald Trump’s second administration could limit the use of vaccines after adding prominent vaccine skeptics such as Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to his cabinet, filmmaker Francis Ford Coppola spoke about his childhood experience with polio and the “horror” of spending 10 days isolated in a hospital ward with “screaming children”.

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 full of screaming children” during his 10-day stay after contracting the highly contagious virus was sick with the virus. That experience “was finally over, thanks to the miraculous Salk vaccination that came just two or three years later,” Coppola continued.

The idea that polio vaccination could be withdrawn is “so absurd,” Coppola said.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’s happening today where the corporations own it.” Coppola also emphasized.

RFK Jr., Donald Trump’s nominee to lead the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, has previously linked vaccines to autism – a myth that has been debunked.

On Tuesday, the politician made it clear that he supports the polio vaccine, despite reports that his lawyer Aaron Siri had called on the government to withdraw the vaccine entirely. Siri helped Kennedy select candidates for health-related positions in Trump’s administration.

“People don’t understand that polio is a fever that only affects you for one night,” Coppola told Deadine. “You’re only sick for one night. The terrible effects of polio, such as the inability to breathe, requiring one to be in an iron lung, or the inability to walk or be completely paralyzed, are the result of the damage done in that one night of infection .”

“I remember that night. I had a fever and they took me to a hospital ward. It was so full of children that there were stretchers stacked three or four high in the hallways because there were so many more children than there were beds in the hospital.”

Coppola also remembers children in iron lungs who “cried for their parents” because they “didn’t understand why they were suddenly in these steel cabinets.” He added, “And I remember being more afraid for those kids than for myself because I wasn’t in one of those things.”

The virus paralyzed Coppola, a realization he gained after he fell out of bed while trying to get up. He spent 10 days in the unit before his parents were able to take him home.

As he explained, the prevailing method of treating polio at the time was immobility theory, which largely meant that the paralyzed person in question was left in bed and not allowed to move at all. His father rejected the idea and instead asked 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 allowing people with polio to exercise, Kenny focused on retraining the muscles. “You sent me this wonderful lady, I remember her name, Mrs. Wilson. She was an older lady with white hair,” Coppola added.

“And she would come to me four days a week and do these very gentle exercises where she would lift the limbs and whatever. And this lady gradually, over the course of four or five months, gave me back the ability to move my left arm. And I am totally grateful and know that the fact that I can walk at all today is thanks to the Sister Kenny system, which was a revolutionary idea back then.”

“To see (polio) disappearing, there are so many stories about the vaccine, how many lives it saved in an epidemic that was getting bigger and bigger…It makes the idea so absurd that now they’re talking about a U-turn on the “We would think about vaccines,” concluded Coppola.

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