The medical societies that ran PPE programs, 2020–2021: a registry
On September 19, 2020, the Wayback Machine captured a storefront page at this domain titled for the North Carolina Medical Society. Its checkout form asked buyers which organization could be thanked for the purchase, and the menu behind that question listed twenty-seven medical organizations, from the Charleston County Medical Society to the American Academy of Physical Medicine & Rehabilitation. That single form field is the closest thing to a member roll the 2020–2021 ActionPPE purchasing program left behind. This registry reconstructs, from dated archive captures and the societies' own announcements, what each partner's page offered and what happened to it.
This registry is historical. The organizations below had purchasing arrangements with the group-buying program that operated at this address in 2020–2021; that program ended in 2021. Entries are drawn from dated archive captures and the organizations’ own announcements, and prices and product descriptions are quoted as facts of that record.
How the co-branded storefronts worked
The program, founded in March 2020 by the Charleston County Medical Society of South Carolina, gave each partner organization a co-branded order page in the site's /3/ directory — /3/ncms/, /3/ohiodo/, /3/medchi/, /3/aapmr/ — with the society's name as the page title and a shared product table beneath it. Captures show the same catalog on every page: KN95 masks certified to the Chinese standard GB2626-2006 (later GB2626-2019), tri-fold disposable masks, polypropylene isolation gowns, U.S.-made face shields, and nitrile exam gloves, joined in late 2020 by a NIOSH-approved N95, the Honeywell H910 Plus, approval number TC-84A-8480. Most pages carried a $250 minimum order; some later pages dropped the minimum and offered free shipping above a threshold instead.
The society pages were storefront skins over one shared operation: the same products, the same Stripe-backed checkout, and that one distinguishing question — which organization to thank — which is how the partner list below survives at all. The pages carried no member gate the archive could see; the brochure site of the era stated that products were available only to qualified medical personnel and not for resale, and the thank-you menu did the affiliating. The Wayback Machine's URL index records the earliest partner-page captures in mid-2020 (the Medical Society of the District of Columbia's page on June 22, 2020; the Missouri State Medical Association's on July 16, 2020) and the last new partner page in August 2021 (the Arkansas Medical Society's). The wider arc of the program — its founding, its claimed 3.4 million units shipped by January 2021, its freeze in mid-2021 — is told in What was ActionPPE?; the fate of this whole class of pandemic purchasing program is traced in Where the programs went.
Read together, the four anchor entries below also form a price series, because the same products recur on every page with dates attached. The 20-pack KN95 sold for $2.68 per mask on the North Carolina page in September 2020, $1.94 on the Ohio page and $1.86 on the Maryland page in January–February 2021, and $1.39 on the AAPM&R page in April 2021; the tri-fold disposable mask fell from $0.49 to $0.24 per mask across the same captures. That halving-in-seven-months is the 2020–21 PPE market normalizing, recorded incidentally in a handful of society storefronts — the kind of fact this registry exists to preserve.
- Mar 2020 Charleston County Medical Society founds the group-buying program; South Carolina physicians are the first buyers.
- Apr 30, 2020 The North Carolina Medical Society announces group purchasing for its members through the Charleston arrangement.
- Jun–Jul 2020 First co-branded storefronts captured in the
/3/directory (Medical Society of the District of Columbia, Missouri State Medical Association). - Sep 19, 2020 Capture of the NCMS page preserves the 27-organization checkout menu reproduced below.
- Nov 17, 2020 The Arkansas Medical Society announces the 500,000-unit Honeywell N95 group buy run with the Wisconsin Medical Society "and over 30 other medical societies."
- Jan–Apr 2021 N95 pre-order banners appear on the MedChi and Ohio Osteopathic pages; by April the AAPM&R page lists the Honeywell respirator in stock.
- Aug 2021 Last new partner page captured (
/3/arma/, Arkansas). Content creation stops; the storefronts sit frozen, still resolving as late as 2023, and are gone by mid-2024.
MedChi — the Maryland State Medical Society
MedChi, the trade name of the Maryland State Medical Society, is the partner whose link to this domain traveled furthest: external pages of the era pointed members at a shortcut path, /medchi, which the Wayback Machine captured on January 27, 2021 as a 301 redirect into the co-branded storefront at /3/medchi/, titled "Maryland State Medical Society | ActionPPE."
The fullest capture of that storefront, February 28, 2021, shows the program at its late-stage mature form. A banner above the product table announced limited-time, special-order access to Honeywell H910 Plus N95 respirators at below-market prices, with a $250 minimum order and free shipping at $500. The table itself listed the shared catalog at the winter 2021 price points: 20-pack KN95 masks at $1.86 per mask, described on the page as certified to GB2626-2019 and as a near equivalent to — not the same thing as — a NIOSH N95, with an FDA manufacturer owner/operator number quoted; 50-pack tri-fold masks at $0.29 per mask; 15-pack polypropylene isolation gowns; 50-pack U.S.-made face shields; and 100-count boxes of 4-mil white nitrile gloves. Captures of the MedChi storefront run from January 27 through October 18, 2021 — after which the page, like the rest of the frozen site, simply aged in place.
The shortcut path is why this entry exists where it does. Links of the era that pointed Maryland physicians to "MedChi's group buying program" used the bare /medchi address, and the site resolved it with a hop into the storefront — the redirect the Wayback Machine recorded twice, in January and February 2021. That path now resolves here, to the dated account of the program it once opened. Anyone following a 2021-era link is in the right place; the storefront it led to is gone, and this page is its record.
The KN95-versus-N95 distinction that page glossed in one parenthesis still decides compliance questions today: a respirator certified only to GB2626-2019 is not NIOSH-approved under 42 CFR Part 84 and cannot anchor a required respiratory-protection program under 29 CFR 1910.134.
Where a Maryland practice turns in 2026. The group buy is gone; the questions it answered are not. How to verify NIOSH approval covers checking any respirator against the live Certified Equipment List before buying. The small-practice respiratory protection guide covers whether stocking N95s obliges an office to run a written OSHA program. The stock-planning article covers how much a practice should actually keep on hand now.
North Carolina Medical Society
The North Carolina Medical Society documented its entry into the program in its own words. An announcement published on ncmedsoc.org on April 30, 2020 told members the society had arranged PPE group purchasing "through a joint group purchasing arrangement with the Charleston County (South Carolina) Medical Society and other state and local medical societies," alongside a second track working with North Carolina manufacturers. The announcement was candid about the model's limits: volume thresholds had to be met before orders could be placed, so it was "not an immediate fix" — members were told to order against their longer-term reopening needs. An early landing page for North Carolina members, captured at this domain in May 2020, described the same sequencing: masks and gowns first, gloves and shields to follow.
The society's storefront at /3/ncms/ is the earliest of the four anchor pages in the archive, captured September 19, 2020, under a group-buying headline and a $250 minimum-order note. Its product table preserves the autumn 2020 price points — KN95s at $2.68 per mask under the older GB2626-2006 standard, tri-fold masks at $0.49, isolation gowns in 15-packs, full-back disposable gowns in 10-packs, face shields marked Made in USA — numbers that had fallen by roughly half when the same products were captured on sister pages four months later, a compressed record of the 2020 PPE price collapse. The same capture preserves the checkout's 27-organization menu, the basis of the table below. Captures show the NCMS page still resolving, unchanged, as late as June 2023, two years after the program went quiet.
Where a North Carolina practice turns in 2026. N95 vs KN95 vs surgical mask settles the product-class question the 2020 storefront glossed. How to verify NIOSH approval replaces trust in any distributor with a TC-number check. The burn-rate article turns "order for your longer-term needs" from a 2020 exhortation into arithmetic.
Ohio Osteopathic Association
The Ohio Osteopathic Association, the state society of Ohio's osteopathic physicians, announced the arrangement on its own homepage: a news item captured there in November 2020 described a new OOA partnership providing PPE "vetted for quality and price" in response to members' need. The association's storefront lived at /3/ohiodo/ — the slug reading "Ohio DO" — under the page title "Ohio Osteopathic Association | ActionPPE."
The principal capture, January 15, 2021, shows the page mid-transition from commodity PPE to the program's one NIOSH-approved product. Above the standard table sat a pre-order banner for the Honeywell H910 Plus N95 — the respirator carrying NIOSH approval TC-84A-8480 — offered by special order at below-market prices, alongside the $250 minimum and free shipping above $500. Below it, the shared catalog at January 2021 prices: KN95s at $1.94 per mask under GB2626-2019, tri-fold masks at $0.29, isolation gowns, face shields, and 4-mil nitrile gloves. That banner was the retail face of the 500,000-unit Honeywell group buys documented in the N95 group-buys article: $3.85 per respirator in the November 2020 first round, a second series organized in early 2021. Captures of the OOA page run from January 2021 to January 2023, the later ones identical — the frozen tail, not continued operation.
One thread of that record is still live. NIOSH's Certified Equipment List, queried in August 2026, shows approval TC-84A-8480 active — not obsolete — covering the H910-series filtering facepiece, with the approval now held by PIP Global Holdings, Inc., the company that later acquired the Honeywell PPE lines. The product outlived the program that sold it.
Where an Ohio osteopathic practice turns in 2026. The small-practice OSHA guide covers what a required respirator program involves under 29 CFR 1910.134. The fit-testing guide covers getting a small office fit-tested without a hospital occupational-health department. Do N95s expire? answers the question raised by any 2021-era cases still in an Ohio supply closet.
American Academy of Physical Medicine & Rehabilitation
The American Academy of Physical Medicine & Rehabilitation — AAPM&R, the national specialty society of physiatrists — is the outlier in this registry: not a state society but a national one, evidence that the program's reach ran along specialty lines as well as state lines. Its storefront at /3/aapmr/, titled "AAPMR | ActionPPE," was captured on April 21, 2021, later than the others, and the page reads like a snapshot of the program's final phase.
By that capture, the terms had loosened — free shipping over $250 and no minimum order, where the 2020 pages had demanded a $250 minimum — and the product mix had shifted with the pandemic itself. A banner noted that an antigen test kit group buy had closed. The Honeywell H910 Plus N95 appeared twice: as in-stock inventory, 50-count boxes at $168 ($3.36 per respirator, flagged as limited quantity), and as a lingering group-buy pre-order listing at the same per-unit price — cheaper than the $3.85 of the November 2020 group buy, at a moment when spot-market N95 prices had collapsed from their 2020 peaks. The listing quoted 95% particle filtration efficiency and pointed buyers to CDC's respirator pages; the surrounding catalog showed the spring 2021 floor prices — KN95s at $1.39 per mask, tri-fold masks at $0.24, gowns at $1.45, face shields at $0.99, 3-mil indigo nitrile gloves. A stray capture from December 2023 shows the page still standing, unchanged, in the site's zombie period — the last of the four anchor storefronts the archive saw alive.
Where a physiatry practice turns in 2026. N95 vs KN95 vs surgical mask maps which product class an outpatient rehabilitation setting actually needs. The fit-testing guide covers annual testing logistics and costs for a small clinical staff. The stock-planning article covers sizing a reserve for an office, not a hospital.
The other partner organizations
The September 19, 2020 capture of the NCMS storefront preserves the full checkout menu — the list of organizations a buyer could name for thanks at checkout. The twenty-seven organizational entries are reproduced below exactly as listed (one menu line was an individual's name and one a generic "Visitors" option; neither is an organization and neither is included). The menu is a September 2020 snapshot: organizations that joined later, such as the Arkansas Medical Society, do not appear in it.
| Organization | Kind |
|---|---|
| Charleston County Medical Society | County medical society (SC) — the program's founder |
| Arizona Medical Association | State medical association |
| Colorado Medical Society | State medical society |
| Maine Medical Association | State medical association |
| Medical Association of the State of Alabama | State medical association |
| Medical Society of the District of Columbia | Medical society (DC) |
| Medical Society of Virginia | State medical society |
| Missouri State Medical Association | State medical association |
| Montana Medical Association | State medical association |
| New Hampshire Medical Society | State medical society |
| North Carolina Medical Society | State medical society |
| North Dakota Medical Society | State medical society (as listed) |
| Ohio State Medical Association | State medical association |
| Pennsylvania Medical Society | State medical society |
| South Dakota State Medical Association | State medical association |
| Vermont Medical Society | State medical society |
| West Virginia State Medical Association | State medical association |
| Wisconsin Medical Society | State medical society — co-anchor of the Nov 2020 N95 group buy |
| Maricopa County Medical Society | County medical society (AZ) |
| Maine Osteopathic Association | State osteopathic association |
| Missouri Association of Osteopathic Physicians and Surgeons | State osteopathic association |
| Ohio Osteopathic Association | State osteopathic association |
| Maine Dental Association | State dental association |
| Maine Primary Care Association | State primary-care association |
| Washington Psychiatric Society | Specialty society |
| American Academy of Physical Medicine & Rehabilitation | National specialty society |
| Northwest Florida Community Hospital | Community hospital (FL) |
The menu understates the network. The Wayback Machine's URL index for the /3/ directory records some twenty co-branded storefront slugs across the program's life — beyond the four anchor pages, slugs such as msdc, msma, mcms, vtmd, ccms, mainedo, maops, sdsma, cms, pamed, and wms, which read cleanly against menu names like the Medical Society of the District of Columbia, the Missouri State Medical Association, and the Wisconsin Medical Society, plus a few (isms, ima, poma) matching no September 2020 menu entry at all. One post-menu addition is documented outside the archive of this domain: the Arkansas Medical Society announced on arkmed.org on November 17, 2020 that it was joining the Honeywell N95 group purchase with "the Wisconsin Medical Society and over 30 other medical societies," and its storefront at /3/arma/ became the last new partner page the Wayback Machine captured, in August 2021. The program's own January 2021 press materials claimed more than forty participating state and national associations at peak. Between the 27-name menu, the twenty-odd slugs, and that claim sits the honest answer: the roster changed month to month, and the September 2020 menu is the fullest single list a dated capture preserves.
What the four anchor entries above share is the shape of the whole registry: an announcement on the society's own site, a co-branded storefront in /3/, the same shared catalog, an N95 banner in the winter of 2020–21, and then a long, silent freeze. No partner page was ever captured announcing a shutdown. The programs did not end; they stopped being needed, and the pages outlived their purpose by two years.
Primary sources
- Wayback Machine capture, September 19, 2020, of
/3/ncms/(storefront, prices, and the 27-organization checkout menu). - Wayback Machine captures, January 27, 2021 (
/medchiredirect) and February 28, 2021 (/3/medchi/storefront). - Wayback Machine capture, January 15, 2021, of
/3/ohiodo/; Wayback capture, November 28, 2020, of the ooanet.org homepage news item announcing the OOA partnership. - Wayback Machine capture, April 21, 2021, of
/3/aapmr/; later capture December 9, 2023. - North Carolina Medical Society, "NCMS Offers Access to PPE," ncmedsoc.org, April 30, 2020 (Wayback capture, May 4, 2020).
- Arkansas Medical Society, "AMS to Partner with WISMED and ActionPPE in Honeywell N95 Group Purchase," arkmed.org, November 17, 2020 (Wayback capture, November 20, 2020).
- NIOSH Certified Equipment List (wwwn.cdc.gov/niosh-cel/), queried August 2026 for approval TC-84A-8480.
- Wayback Machine CDX URL index for actionppe.org (capture dates and the roster of
/3/partner slugs).