Bryan Steil, a US congressman for Wisconsin, has been mocked by netizens on Twitter and in Chinese social media for a recent tweet saying that he could not read the bilingual “instructions” in both Chinese and English for a made-in-China KN95 facial mask.
Steil tweeted a photo of a Chinese-manufactured KN95 facial mask with its certificate of authenticity in both Chinese and English on Friday, with a caption saying, “Speaker Pelosi sent out N-95 masks to every House office. Unfortunately, I can’t read the instructions.”
The tweet soon sparked discussions among Twitter users while Steil has been mocked for his “disingenuous” tweet.
“This is so disingenuous. I have these same masks in black. There are instructions in English inside and on the package,” Twitter user “Frank Noschese” commented.
“That’s the certificate of authenticity, not instructions, and that’s a KN95, not an N95, but it’s very brave of you to admit you can’t read English either,” another Twitter user commented on the tweet.
Meanwhile, multiple Chinese netizens also commented when seeing a screenshot of the Tweet on Chinese-Twitter like Sina Weibo.
“Do you even need to read instructions for wearing a mask?” a Weibo user asked, while several Chinese netizens questioned why Steil could not understand the English instructions.
According to Steil’s tweet, the KN95 mask is produced by a Chinese company called Powecom, based in Guangzhou, South China’s Guangdong Province.
Guangzhou Powecom Labor Insurance Supplies Co was founded in 2009 dedicated to manufacturing functional masks. It has 300 mask production lines making 15 million masks per day. The enterprise is a “white list” enterprise urgently used by China, the US and the EU and has supplied more than one billion masks to the world since the beginning of the COVID-19 epidemic.
Official data shows that China has provided about 372 billion face masks, more than 4.2 billion pieces of protective clothing, and 8.4 billion test reagents to the international community as of the end of 2021.
The Omicron variant is spreading rapidly across the US, and there were 748,484 new confirmed COVID-19 cases in the country on Thursday, according to data from the New York Times.
N95 face masks on a production line of KYD, an automatic mask machine factory in Dongguan, South China’s Guangdong Province on Thursday. Photo: Wang Bozun/GT
