Josh Shapiro Arms Himself With Draconian Police Powers Amid Re-Election Fight

Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro is pushing to radically rewrite his state’s health code to give his administration authoritarian police powers as he seeks re-election.

The Democrat’s proposed change would give Pennsylvania’s Department of Health centralized police powers under the guise of “disease control measures,” including the ability to enter homes and schools without a warrant, access confidential medical records, and impose statewide school mask mandates for disease prevention. The Department of Health reports to the governor’s office, meaning this change would give Shapiro — and his successors — the ability to single-handedly implement draconian policies across the state.

“The administration’s proposed new regulations on mask mandates and communicable diseases are deeply concerning,” Pennsylvania lawmaker Michele Brooks told The Daily Wire. “These include catch-all authority to impose masking, distancing, and virtually any other disease-control measure it wants, a statewide vaccine database with mandatory reporting, authority to restrict attendance at funerals, and extraordinarily broad powers to monitor private health information and enter private property.”

Pennsylvanians voted to limit the unilateral emergency powers of the governor’s office through a constitutional amendment in May 2021. Shapiro, who touts himself as a moderate and centrist, is said to be on Democrats’ short list of possible 2028 presidential nominees. His office did not respond to The Daily Wire’s requests for comment.

The Pennsylvania Department of Health can currently only impose disease control measures when attempting to provide “surveillance” of infectious disease outbreaks. Added clauses in the massive 502-page regulation proposal unveiled on August 8 would allow the department to implement disease control measures not only for surveillance, but also for the “prevention, containment, or mitigation” of a disease, infection, or “condition.” Disease “prevention” could include measures such as coerced vaccination and mask mandates, without the active spread of infectious disease. The term “condition,” another new addition to the health code, is nebulously defined as a “noninfectious medical ailment or other health-related event.”

The Daily Wire asked the Department of Health if, under the new regulation, it could proactively impose a statewide school-mask mandate before flu season to prevent flu outbreaks and if the term “conditions” included mental health problems. The department did not respond to The Daily Wire’s requests for comment.

The regulatory changes hand Shapiro’s team unfettered power to enter apartments, schools, or any “other location” determined by the Department of Health when conducting a disease investigation, without a warrant.  

“The department or local health authority may enter an apartment, building, health care facility, school, college or university, or other location as necessary to conduct its investigation under this chapter if the representative presents documentation to establish that they are an authorized representative of the department or the local health authority,” states the regulation proposal.

The new regulation explicitly states that no person can “interfere” with a DOH investigation and further specifies that health bureaucrats have the power “to meet and speak with a student or other person in private” at schools. It explicitly states that school employees “may not obstruct” an investigation of a student. 

Randall Wenger, chief counsel of the Independence Law Center, told The Daily Wire he is troubled by how these regulatory changes could interfere with parental rights.

“Parents have a fundamental right to direct the upbringing of their children. And these regulations that allow a bureaucrat to go into a school to meet with a child without parents’ knowledge and telling the school officials that they can’t even interfere with this,” Wenger said. “That ends up then interfering with the parents’ fundamental right to direct the care and upbringing of their children. That’s unconscionable. I don’t want any government agent coming in and talking one-on-one with my child about immensely personal subjects like sexually transmitted diseases.”

Other expansions of the Department of Health’s authority include gaining the ability to confidentially access citizen health records and the power to exclude K-12 and college students from receiving an in-person education if they are deemed “susceptible” to a disease. It also allows the Pennsylvania Department of Health to create a mandatory statewide Birth Defect Registry for newborns and requires healthcare providers to input every delivered vaccination into a statewide database, unless the patient proactively declines in writing.

Shapiro is already hinting at how this data could be publicly shared. Five days before announcing the regulation changes, the governor published an online database with detailed information about the vaccination rates of kindergarten, 7th grade, and 12th grade students in private and public schools throughout Pennsylvania. The database includes the rates of religious, philosophical, and medical exemptions at each school. Secretary of Health Dr. Debra L. Bogen said sharing this personal data was an important “tool” to help families and community leaders to “work together to reduce the risk of vaccine-preventable diseases” in a social media post.

Wenger told The Daily Wire the database is an example of the Shapiro administration’s contempt for religious vaccine exemptions.

“The Shapiro administration again demonstrates its contempt for religious exemptions by publishing this vaccination database,” he said. “Its effect is to expose and target schools with high rates of students claiming statutory exemptions, generating public pressure and political justification for government intervention in the name of public health.”

Shapiro promised to protect vaccination in an October 2025 Executive Order that accuses Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and the Trump administration of sowing “confusion and chaos around vaccines” and directs state agencies to follow vaccine advice from the American Academy of Pediatrics instead of recommendations from the “politically influenced” Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Shapiro signed the order during a press conference hosted at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, which helped draft and develop the proposed health code regulations, according to the Department of Health. Shapiro said the Pennsylvania economy depended on “people having access to vaccines.”

“This isn’t just good public health guidance. This is also really good for our economy,” Shapiro said during the press conference. “More than half of all vaccines administered in the United States come from a facility here in the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania. This vaccine production is responsible for 4,700 jobs of our fellow Pennsylvanians and generates 4.74 billion dollars for our economy … It’s also big business for us here in this Commonwealth. Our health, our safety, and our economy all depend on people having access to vaccines. And sadly, RFK Jr. and the president want to try and take that away from us.”

The Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia did not respond to The Daily Wire’s requests for comment.

The Shapiro administration openly admits pushback against COVID-19 restrictions motivated the proposed regulation changes. It cites Corman v. Acting Secretary of Pennsylvania Department of Health, a case in which the Pennsylvania Supreme Court ruled the Pennsylvania Department of Health did not have the power to enforce a statewide school mandate, as the impetus for the drastic restructuring of Pennsylvania’s health code.

Former Pennsylvania Governor Tom Wolf used his unchecked emergency powers to impose some of the harshest COVID restrictions in the nation from March 2020 to June 2021. These policies were doggedly enforced by Shapiro, who at that time was Pennsylvania’s attorney general and became known as the muscle of Wolf’s COVID regime.

Shapiro defended Wolf’s order that closed Pennsylvania businesses for months, calling it “a lawful exercise of the Commonwealth’s police power” in a May 2020 legal brief submitted to the United States Supreme Court. When a federal judge struck down Wolf’s ordinance that prohibited citizens from gathering in groups in September 2020, Shapiro filed a successful motion to have the ruling stayed, and the gathering restrictions were reinstated by October 2020.

Pennsylvanians responded to the authoritarian COVID mitigation measures by passing a constitutional amendment in May 2021 that limited the governor’s emergency powers to three weeks, ending an almost yearlong mask mandate and other disease control restrictions.

During the summer of 2021, Wolf urged local school boards to impose their own mask mandates as a requirement to attend classes. Most school districts ignored his pleas and less than 15% planned to mandate masks by the end of July 2021, according to reporting from the Associated Press.

Wolf was stripped of his power but used the Department of Health to create a statewide school mask mandate that acting Health Secretary Alison Beam announced on August 31, 2021. A group of parents challenged the legality of the order and faced off with Shapiro at the Pennsylvania Supreme Court, where he ruthlessly defended the order and called the parents “self-centered.” 

“Petitioners seem to believe they know best how to protect the health and safety of school-aged children in the midst of a global pandemic,” wrote Shapiro in a legal brief. “To that end, they seek to place their hands on the proverbial scales of justice and, in doing so, bypass the Secretary of Health. But petitioner’s self-centered gambit — which fails to take the power of the executive into account — cannot carry the day.”  

Pennsylvania’s Supreme Court handed Shapiro a major loss in December 2021 when it ruled the Department of Health had acted outside of its regulatory authority, ending the statewide school mask mandate. But the court’s ruling noted the department could change to regulation and grant itself more power.

“We’ve already seen how this kind of authority can be abused, and we cannot allow the mistakes of the past to be repeated,” Brooks told The Daily Wire. “Pennsylvanians haven’t forgotten how these powers can be misused. They remember how our last governor and Department of Health imposed sweeping and arbitrary statewide lockdowns that devastated small businesses and disrupted the lives and education of millions.”

“It is shocking that the administration is now trying to work around those democratically enacted limits through regulation.”