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Did Your Job Give You Masks or Other Protective Gear? Send Us a Picture.

You can help us find out if the equipment issued to federal employees is certified for protective use.

Lisa Larson-Walker/ProPublica; Source Image: RyanJLane/Getty Images

We’d like to see pictures of the personal protective equipment that government agencies have issued to their workers. In particular, we’re interested in the types of face masks and respirators that workers have received (respirators are commonly known as N95 masks, or if certified to Chinese standards, KN95 masks).

In our reporting, we’ve seen some federal agencies purchase respirators that are not approved for use in health care settings or that don’t meet Food and Drug Administration standards. We want to find out if the equipment issued to federal employees is safe and suitable for protective use.

The only way to see if an item meets FDA or other standards is to know who manufactured it. Help us investigate by sending pictures of the equipment you’ve been given — both the item itself and the packaging it came in showing the name of the manufacturer. Something like this would work:

L: Jim Norris/ProPublica, R: Derek Willis/ProPublica

Or this:

Sean Campbell/ProPublica

We might need to get in touch with you to learn more about how you’ve been told to use the equipment. We appreciate you sharing your story, and we take your privacy seriously. ProPublica is gathering this information for our reporting, not for immediate publication.

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