First American to go public with monkeypox calls out CDC

A man who got monkeypox has gone viral for talking about his experience.

Matt Ford, who goes back and forth between both New York City and Los Angeles, had been exposed via a friend in LA through skin-to-skin contact. He noticed lesions in his “underwear zone,” he wrote in an article for BuzzFeed.

In the article, he explained that he took to Twitter and TikTok to speak about his case last week “to hopefully curb more infections ahead of New York Pride.”

According to Ford, it took the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention three days to give him an official diagnosis when he “already knew” what they would say.

“According to my doctor … the CDC is doing a really lackluster job of tracking how many cases there actually are,” he says in a TikTok video.

“[This is] due to a lack of testing, and generally not being on top of it.”

The lesions spread to other areas of his body, including his face, arms, hands and abdomen.

“I think in total I counted 25 and there are also some in more sensitive areas, which tend to be the most painful. They’re so painful that I had to go to my doctor to get painkillers just to be able to sleep, like really f–king painful,” he said.

After noticing the spots, they began filling with pus and being itchy, he said.

Ford also experienced flu-like symptoms, including a fever and cough. 

When his symptoms first started on June 17, monkeypox cases had first hit triple digits in the US. It was warned that this number could be inaccurate because so few tests had been taken.

“While it was reassuring to know I wasn’t alone, it also made me worry that cases were being severely undercounted,” he said.