President Rodrigo Roa Duterte. INQUIRER FILE PHOTO/JOAN BONDOC
Where in the world is “The Punisher”?
For the nth time, Malacañang on Thursday put down rumors that President Duterte could be seriously ill after he was not seen attending any official public event since Monday.
Known as a night owl, the 72-year-old Chief Executive had been very visible in public since taking his oath in June last year, holding meetings and press conferences even in the wee hours.
His spokesperson, Ernesto Abella, was apparently unsure of the President’s official schedule, but said Mr. Duterte was just in his hometown of Davao City where he has held “meetings” in the past few days.
The Presidential Communications Operations Office said Nikolay P. Patrushev, the secretary general of Russia’s security council, was set to meet the President in Davao on Thursday.
Asked if Mr. Duterte, whose last official activity was a visit to the quake-hit Surigao City on Sunday, received any medical treatment recently, Abella replied: “As far as I know, none.”
“Again, you have to understand that his schedules are really brutal and anybody would need to rest,” he told a press briefing in Malacañang.
Asked to elaborate, he said: “I am not saying that he took a health-related break. I said he is in Davao. And if he is resting there, then that’s why he’s there. But it’s not a health-related break.”
Mr. Duterte, who earned the moniker “The Punisher” for his take-no-prisoners strategy against criminality when he was the mayor of Davao, had previously denied reports that he was afflicted with cancer.
In a speech before a group of taxpayers last week, the President disclosed that a certain Doctor Del Rosario from Cardinal Santos Medical Center in San Juan City had visited him in Malacañang after he felt pain in his heart.
He said he had to undergo “EKG,” also known as ECG, or electrocardiogram, a medical test to determine the electrical activity of the heart.
The septuagenarian leader had admitted that he was taking cancer pills to relieve unbearable pain in his spine despite a warning from his doctor that he could lose his cognitive ability and that he was already “abusing the drug.”