Family and friends on the front lines of healthcare protecting us from Covid was what inspired us to start GMM. In fact our mission statement back in April was “Respirators for HCWs NOW!” HCWs standing for Healthcare Workers. Henry Park’s and Gene Chuang’s wives are both pediatricians who have been working non-stop through this pandemic and were asked to reuse their N95s for 2-week stretches when the first lockdowns happened.
While going to a market to pick up brown paper bags to sanitize N95s, Henry started researching the risks of reusing the masks and realized that something had to be done. The first person he called was Gene and both reached out to friends and colleagues to create the group of volunteers that is GMM today.
The world has never seen such demand and supply imbalance and crisis around a single product like we experienced with respiratory medical masks. With so many issues of fraud and quality in the US market for respiratory masks, GMM quickly became the quality control and sourcing experts for its network of healthcare workers on the front lines.