Fact Check: Marcos Did Not Give Willie Ong Financial Aid After Cancer Diagnosis

A video posted to YouTube in mid-September claimed that President Ferdinand Marcos Jr. had visited cardiologist and health personality Dr. Willie Ong in the hospital and given him substantial financial aid after learning of his cancer diagnosis. The video's title promised tears of gratitude. It accumulated 218,000 views and over 4,000 likes on a channel with 186,000 subscribers. None of it was true.

The video's narrator described a personal hospital visit by Marcos, an offer of money whose amount was left unspecified, and a promise of future assistance. The footage looped clips of Ong crying, paired with text suggesting his tears were ones of thanks to the president. The thumbnail featured a photograph showing Marcos and Ong together—except the image had been edited. A reverse search traced the original to a Philippine Star post from September 10, documenting Marcos's visit to the Philippine Heart Center for the opening of a new urgent care program. The photo had been repurposed and manipulated to support a false narrative.

When Rappler contacted Ong directly, his response was unambiguous. He had received no financial assistance from Marcos. The president had not visited him. Instead, Marcos had sent what Ong called "feelers"—intermediaries, specifically someone named Cesar Chavez—rather than reaching out himself. Ong made this clarification in a postscript to a post thanking Vice President Sara Duterte for her well wishes. Marcos's office did not dispute the account.

Ong had announced his diagnosis publicly in September: sarcoma, a rare cancer of the abdomen. The video exploited his vulnerability by weaving together screenshots from his own YouTube videos about his condition, selecting the most emotionally raw moments and presenting them out of context. In one clip Ong discussed the failures of the country's healthcare system. In another he wept while discussing corruption among politicians. The video repurposed his genuine anguish to manufacture a false story of presidential benevolence.

The timing and scale of the disinformation campaign are worth noting. The video dropped while Ong's diagnosis was still fresh news, when public sympathy was high and attention was focused on his health. The 186,000-subscriber channel gave it immediate reach. By the time fact-checkers caught up, the false claim had already circulated widely enough to shape how some people understood both Marcos's character and Ong's situation.

Ong, despite his illness, had filed his certificate of candidacy for the 2025 midterm elections as a senatorial candidate just days after his diagnosis became public. He is a familiar figure in Philippine media—a doctor who built an audience by offering health advice on social platforms, and a political actor who had run as vice presidential candidate alongside former Manila mayor Isko Moreno in 2022. His public profile made him a useful figure for a disinformation campaign: recognizable enough to draw clicks, prominent enough that a fabricated story about presidential attention would seem plausible.

The incident is a straightforward case of how false narratives can be constructed from real elements—a real president, a real doctor, a real diagnosis, real photographs, real video clips—reassembled into a fiction designed to spread. The video did not invent Marcos or Ong. It took their actual existence and created a meeting that never happened, an offer that was never made, and emotions that were real but misrepresented. What remains is a record of how quickly such stories can travel, and how much damage they can do to the people they claim to celebrate.