The Record

What happened, on the record

In the spring of 2020, the ordinary channels that supplied personal protective equipment to American medical practices failed the small ones first. What filled the gap — for a while — was improvisation: county and state medical societies pooling their members' orders, ad-hoc nonprofits vetting suppliers, a group-buying collective operating at this domain that grew to more than forty partner associations. The Record preserves that episode from primary evidence: dated Wayback Machine captures, the societies' own announcements, press releases, and contemporaneous coverage. Every date below is capture-verifiable; where the archive is silent, the silence is stated rather than papered over.

The mobilization, dated

• March 2020 A county medical society founds ActionPPE during the first COVID-19 wave; the e-commerce site launches within about ten days.
• Spring–summer 2020 State partnerships begin — Pennsylvania, Arizona, West Virginia among the first; the co-branded society storefronts at /3/ come online.
• November 2020 The first N95 group buy: 500,000 Honeywell H910 Plus respirators (TC-84A-8480) at $3.85 each.
• January 2021 Claimed totals reach 3.4 million units, 2,606 practices, 40-plus associations.
• February 2021 The Second Series N95 group buy.
• Mid-2021 Vaccines roll out, the shortage eases, and the ad-hoc programs freeze — quietly, without announcements.
• December 2023 Project N95, the national clearinghouse, winds down after distributing some 37 million units.

The articles

• What was ActionPPE?
  The collective itself, on the record: founding, mechanics, scale claims, wind-down, and the domain's later years — from dated captures.

• The medical societies that ran PPE programs: a registry
  Dated entries for MedChi, the North Carolina Medical Society, the Ohio Osteopathic Association, and AAPM&R, with a table of the other partner organizations — and where a practice in each state turns in 2026.

• How doctors got real N95s in late 2020: the 500,000-unit group buys
  The pooled pre-orders in full detail — prices, deadlines, the respirator's approval number — and the verification skill that outlives them.

• Where the pandemic PPE purchasing programs went
  Why the improvised channels closed, what replaced them, and how a practice sources PPE it can trust in 2026.

The practical questions the mobilization raised — which masks satisfy a required program, how to verify an approval, whether stockpiled respirators are still usable — are carried forward in The Reference. A short orientation to the N95 questions specifically lives at /n95/, the path the group buys once occupied.