Sen. Dawn Keefer (R-31)
Gov. Josh Shapiro is trying to seize authoritarian powers that would make the COVID lockdowns look like a dress rehearsal. His Department of Health’s (DOH) massive 502-page proposed regulation, issued in June, is a deliberate end run around the will of the people and the Pennsylvania Constitution. It must be stopped cold.
This is not public health. This is centralized police power dressed up as “disease control measures.”
Under the proposal, the DOH — which answers directly to the governor — would gain authority to impose masking, distancing and virtually any other restriction not only for surveillance of active outbreaks, but for the “prevention, containment or mitigation” of a disease, infection or vaguely defined “condition.” A “condition” is described as a noninfectious medical ailment or other health-related event. That language is deliberately boundless. It opens the door to proactive statewide school mask mandates before flu season, coerced measures against conditions that have nothing to do with contagion and bureaucratic overreach limited only by the imagination of Shapiro’s appointees.
Even more alarming is the green light for warrantless entry. King Shapiro’s regulation states the department or local health authority “may enter an apartment, building, healthcare facility, school, college or university, or other location as necessary” simply by presenting credentials. No warrant! No probable cause! No judicial oversight! Constitutional rights be damned. Citizens are forbidden from “interfering.” School employees “may not obstruct” investigators who want to pull a student aside for a private conversation about highly personal medical matters — without parental knowledge or consent. Parents’ fundamental right to direct the upbringing and medical care of their children is treated as an inconvenience to be brushed aside.
Shapiro’s proposal also creates a mandatory statewide vaccine database (opt-out only if the patient affirmatively declines in writing), a birth-defect registry for newborns and the power to exclude students from in-person education if they are deemed “susceptible.” It hands the department authority to restrict attendance at funerals and to access confidential medical records. Five days before rolling out this power grab, the administration published a public database listing school-by-school vaccination rates and exemption percentages — effectively painting targets on communities exercising their statutory rights to religious or philosophical exemptions.
We’ve already rejected this path for Pennsylvania. In May 2021, voters amended the state constitution to limit unilateral emergency declarations to three weeks after witnessing the economic devastation, educational harm and arbitrary enforcement of the Wolf-Shapiro era. Shapiro, then attorney general, was the enforcer of those policies. He defended business closures as a “lawful exercise of the commonwealth’s police power,” fought to reinstate gathering bans after a federal court struck them down, and later called parents challenging a statewide school mask mandate “self-centered” while defending the DOH’s overreach all the way to the state Supreme Court. When the court ruled the department lacked authority, it noted the agency could simply rewrite its regulations. Shapiro’s team is now doing exactly that — bypassing the legislature and the voters.
“Let’s be clear,” this is not about preparing for the next pandemic. This is about institutionalizing the very powers voters stripped away from dictators like Wolf and Shapiro. It is about creating a permanent infrastructure of control that future governors can activate on a whim under the elastic banner of “prevention.” And it arrives as Shapiro positions himself for higher office, seeking tools that would let him — and any successor — impose sweeping restrictions without legislative approval or meaningful checks.
As legislators, we will not stand for it. We will fight this regulation at every stage of the Independent Regulatory Review Commission process. We will demand full legislative oversight. We will defend the constitutional limits Pennsylvanians enacted. And we will remind every family in this commonwealth that government exists to secure liberty, not to invent new ways to invade homes, classrooms and medical privacy.
COVID lockdown was a trial run. Shapiro is now trying to make the experiment permanent. Pennsylvanians remember. We will not comply with this power grab, and we will not allow it to become law.