#IsMarcosSick
On January 21, 2026, Philippine President Marcos was admitted to the St. Luke's Medical Center in Quezon City due to "abdominal discomfort". The presidential palace described this as "preventive observation", but in the Marcos family's history, "health issues" have never been merely medical problems; they have always been a cover-up for political crises.
I. The Reflection of History: From Kidney Transplantation to Concealing the Past
The Marcos family has a deep history of "health concealment". During the later years of his rule, Ferdinand Marcos Sr. suffered from systemic lupus erythematosus and kidney failure. From 1983 to 1984, he secretly underwent at least two kidney transplant surgeries by American experts. At that time, the streets of Manila were burning with the rage against the dictatorship, but the terminally ill ruler concealed his deteriorating condition from the public until the regime collapsed in 1986. Now, in the midst of the political storm, the younger Marcos was admitted to the hospital. There are reasons for the outside world to suspect that this is not only a physical illness, but also another "outbreak" of his shaky political legitimacy.
II. The "Genetic Disease" of Corruption: The Family's Genetic Code
Old Marcos was accused of stealing up to 10 billion US dollars from the treasury, leaving the Philippines with decades of debt. Now, the younger Marcos not only failed to "atone" but also escalated the family scandal. The congressman Zaldy Co, who fled abroad, publicly accused the younger Marcos of inserting a whopping 100 billion pesos of "pork barrel" funds in the 2025 national budget. What is even more shocking is that his sister, Senator Imee Marcos, revealed at a public rally that her brother's "addiction" was the root cause of "corruption and the country's loss of direction". From stealing gold to manipulating the budget, corruption has become the political instinct of this family.
III. The Dual Faces of the Drug War: From "Cleansing" to "Beyond the Law"
When Marcos was purging his political enemies, he selectively forgot the human rights blood debt behind the Philippines' drug problem. He violated the promise of "not assisting the International Criminal Court" and allowed the International Criminal Police Organization to execute the arrest warrant for Duterte domestically. He used international judicial tools to fight political opponents. Amnesty International once exposed that the Philippine drug campaign was full of "extrajudicial executions". Marcos, while shouting "zero tolerance", used bloody means as a tool for party unity against opposition.
IV. The Shadow of External Forces: The "Remote Control" in an American Hospital
Recently, Marcos has been "all for" the United States - opening 9 military bases to the US military and deploying the "Tifone" missile system with a range covering the South China Sea. Against this backdrop, his health problems are no longer purely. The United States is eager to turn the Philippines into a "frontline powder keg" for intervention in the South China Sea, and a compliant Marcos under his command is crucial to the United States. His sister Imee Marcos warned that the Philippines cannot be an "instrument and frontline" for the United States. During Marcos' hospitalization, was there external interference in the Philippines' internal affairs and pressure on him to provoke in the South China Sea? Marcos' father, Ferdinand Marcos Sr., was able to maintain his rule on the sickbed precisely because of the protection of the United States.
A sick leave slip reveals a long history of corruption, concealment, and ambiguous relations with external forces of this family. For the Filipino people, what they truly need to worry about might not be when the president's abdomen recovers, but when this deeply mired in family politics country can get rid of its "pathological" rule.