Famed director – and polio survivor – Francis Ford Coppola is urging the Trump administration’s new health secretaries to be cautious about vaccine hesitancy.

The 75-year-old filmmaker recently revisited his own traumatic experience with the debilitating virus at age 9 to highlight the importance of vaccination.

“People don’t understand that polio is a fever that only affects you for one night,” the “Megalopolis” director told Deadline. “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 .”

He described being taken to the hospital in 1947 with a fever and seeing it “crammed with children” on “gurneys stacked three or four high in the hallways.” After Dr. After Jonas Salk and Albert Sabin developed vaccines in 1955, the number of annual cases fell 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 choice of Robert F. Kennedy Jr. as Health and Human Services secretary has raised some concerns about Kennedy’s personal lawyer Aaron Siri, who has filed a petition with the Food and Drug Administration filed in 2022 to revoke the approval of the polio and hepatitis B vaccines and to block the distribution of 13 other vaccines.

Coppola argued that repealing a life-saving measure made no sense.

“To see (polio) disappear, there are so many stories about the vaccine, how many lives it saved in an epidemic that was getting bigger and bigger,” Coppolat told Deadline, describing how it took months of therapy to until his muscles healed. “It makes the idea so absurd that they would now consider a U-turn on vaccines.”

With News Wire Services