This is an urgent RISING ACTION that you can all take now with our partners at National Nurses United.

Due to a national shortage of face masks, the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) downgraded its guidelines and is now recommending that nurses use bandanas and scarves as makeshift masks when caring for COVID-19 patients — despite proof that they provide almost no effective protection against the virus.

These recommendations are putting our nurses, frontline health care workers, and patients at extreme risk. We need your help to expose the truth about what is going on in hospitals and clinics across the country and pressure the CDC to adjust these guidelines to protect frontline nurses.

We’re asking everyone (that means you) to post a selfie wearing a bandana or something like it to expose the lack of personal protective equipment and call on the CDC to protect frontline nurses immediately.


Photo Credit: instagram.com/EveEnsler

Step-by-step Instructions:

  1. Find a bandana in your house, or something else like it such as a scarf or dish towel
  2. Download & print this sign, or make your own, that says “This is not protection. Sign the petition at protectnurses.org
  3. Take a selfie wearing your bandana with your sign
  4. Post in on Facebook and Twitter and tag @CDCgov AND your congressperson with this text (or something similar):.@CDCgov @NNUBonnie @StefRoberson this is NOT personal protective equipment. Bandanas and scarves provide almost NO effective protection when #COVID19 patients are highly contagious.

    #ProtectNurses and save lives: strengthen PPE guidelines for frontline health care workers NOW!

    If you need an example, check out ours here:


Hospitals are asking nurses to battle this highly infectious virus with little to no protection. This is unacceptable.

At a White House briefing, President Trump said millions of masks were in production and that the federal government was making efforts to address the shortages – but he did not provide any details as to when or how many masks would be made available.

At a moment when we are asking nurses and other health care workers to step up and protect people, we must be able to protect them as well.

All of our lives are at stake. If nurses get sick, they can’t take care of patients. And if they can’t see patients, this pandemic will spiral further out of control.

The time is NOW to take all precautions to protect nurses and health care workers on the frontlines.

Thank you for helping expose this crisis and for standing in solidarity with nurses.

National Nurses United