Francis Ford Coppola, the Oscar-winning filmmaker, remembers his experience overcoming polio.
The American filmmaker, who was afflicted with polio at the age of nine, recounted the disease’s rapid onset in an interview with Deadline about his upcoming movie “Megalopolis.”
Coppola told the publication, “People don’t realise that polio is a fever that only affects you for one night.”
“You are just ill for one night. “The damage of that one night of the infection is what causes the terrible effects of polio, like being unable to breathe and having to be in an iron lung, or not being able to walk or being completely paralyzed,” he said. “I recall that evening. They transported me to a hospital ward because I had a fever. There were so many more children than there were beds in the hospital that gurneys were stacked three and four high in the hallways.”
Children under the age of five are most commonly affected by polio, which can result in permanent paralysis and even death. According to the WHO, vaccination is the only way to avoid this highly contagious disease, which has no known cure. The disease was eventually virtually eradicated after a vaccine was developed and widely distributed in 1955. However, recent vaccine scepticism has raised worries that if people decide not to get vaccinated, polio outbreaks may recur more regularly.
Coppola, who is now 85, depicted his stay in a polio ward in a depressing light.
“I recall the children in the iron lungs, whose faces were seen on mirrors, and who were all in tears for their parents. They had no idea why they had found themselves in these steel cabinets all of a sudden,” he stated. “Because I wasn’t in one of those things, I remember being more afraid for those kids than for myself.”
The respirators that let polio sufferers breathe were called iron lungs.
Coppola claimed to have battled the illness.
He remarked, “I was looking around, and then I fell on the floor and realised I couldn’t walk when I tried to get out of bed.” “I was unable to rise. And before my parents could ultimately bring me home, I spent roughly ten days in that ward.
The renowned filmmaker attributes his survival to his father, musician Carmine Coppola, who pursued several therapies to support his son.
He also praised the vaccine’s creators.
“Dr. Jonas Salk and Albert Sabin, the two physicians who created the Salk vaccine, gave the public access to their vaccine patents instead of the corporations that currently possess them,” Coppola stated.
“There are a lot of anecdotes about the vaccination and how many lives it saved in an epidemic that was only getting worse, so it’s great to see [polio] disappear. The notion that they would think about changing their stance on vaccines at this time is just ridiculous.”
