Shapiro Lies and Scare Tactics to Take Away Our Freedom

In the 2021 case, Corman v. Acting Secretary of the Pennsylvania Department of Health, the Pennsylvania Supreme Court affirmed the lower court’s decision striking down the 2021 statewide school-mask order.

Bureaucrats want to ensure their unchecked power, so the Pennsylvania Department of Health has proposed a 502-page overhaul of 28 Pa. Code Chapter 27 governing communicable and noncommunicable diseases. Proposed Regulation 10-242, IRRC No. 3490, would expand disease reporting and surveillance systems, establish new reporting requirements for immunizations and birth defects, plus rewrite contact-tracing rules and the Commonwealth’s disease-control provisions.

Some updates to decades-old regulations may be reasonable. PA must be able to respond rapidly to truly dangerous outbreaks. But useful technical updates do not justify bundling them with broad grants of coercive power. The Department itself states that federal law or a court order does not mandate the package and that the 2021 decision striking down the statewide school-mask mandate influenced its proposed rewrite.

That history demands heightened scrutiny—not a regulatory end-run around the limits recognized by the courts.

The proposal would authorize the Department or a local health authority to use “any other disease control measure” it considers appropriate for the surveillance, prevention, containment, or mitigation of disease. Language that broad is not a narrow emergency tool. It could become the claimed foundation for future mask mandates, distancing, access restrictions, closures, or other mandates affecting schools, businesses, churches, workplaces, and daily life.

Rules with consequences this serious should not rest on an agency’s judgment alone. The General Assembly, not unelected regulators, must establish the scope, triggers, duration, geographic reach, and limits of extraordinary public-health powers. •

One of those powers is expanded entry and contact-tracing authority beyond what the current law allows. The proposal empowers the Department or local health authority to “enter an apartment, building, health care facility, school, college or university, or other location as necessary to carry out contact tracing or partner services,” and requires that persons “not obstruct or interfere with” these efforts. This opens previously restricted access to private and institutional spaces and creates new legal risks for individuals and employees who question the erosion of privacy and property rights.

Isolation and quarantine can be necessary ONLY for grave, contagious threats. They are also among the most severe powers government can exercise over a free person’s liberty. The proposal empowers health authorities to determine who must be isolated or quarantined, where that confinement will occur, and which contacts are covered. Yet the text does NOT pair those powers with a complete, modern due-process framework.

Any final policy must require individualized evidence, written notice, prompt access to counsel and judicial review, the least restrictive effective measure, time limits, periodic reassessment, medical necessity supported by objective standards, and reasonable protections for employment, caregiving, medication, food, and family communication.

The proposed school contact-tracing provision would require your child’s school to provide state or local health officials access to your child—even during class or a school function—and permit health officials to meet with the student privately without parental knowledge or consent.

The proposal relies on an existing Pennsylvania statute that permits minors to consent to services involving venereal and other reportable diseases. But the regulation does not add a clear parental-notification safeguard or narrowly cabin private access to the circumstances in which existing law truly authorizes minor consent.

Parents are the primary guardians of their children’s health and welfare. Except where a specific statute clearly provides otherwise or where abuse, neglect, or an immediate medical emergency is involved, parents should receive notice and participate in decisions involving interviews, testing, treatment, isolation, quarantine, and disclosure of a child’s medical information.

The expanded power also broadens the school exclusion criteria, making it easier to remove students from educational settings based on the Department’s evolving standards, disrupting education and pressuring families into compliance. The proposal expands the definition of persons “susceptible” to measles and other diseases to include those without two age-appropriate doses of vaccines given at least one month apart after 12 months of age, without documented disease history, without serological evidence of immunity, or born after December 31, 1956, allowing exclusion until vaccination, proof of non-susceptibility, or 21 days without cases.

The proposal says the Department or a local health authority “shall have access to” patient medical records during an investigation and may demand electronic copies in a manner acceptable to the government. Even when disease investigations require limited access, the rule should specify necessity, relevance, data minimization, security standards, retention and deletion schedules, access logs, breach notification, and meaningful remedies for misuse.

Pennsylvanians should not have to trust that broad access will always be used wisely. Privacy protections must be written into the law and enforceable against the government.

Instead, this regulation creates for the first time ever in PA, mandatory immunization participation in the state database. Unless a patient knows to opt out in writing, they will be placed in a state database, giving the government enhanced access to your private vaccination information

The regulation also expands the reportable conditions that fall under these expanded powers, adding 73 new diseases, infections, and conditions for health care facilities and providers to track, and 53 more for laboratories. This will result in even more intrusion into your privacy and cause health premiums to rise, along with the cost of monitoring all of this.

The proposal would require detailed immunization reporting and create a statewide birth-defects and congenital-anomalies registry. Public-health research can serve legitimate purposes, but centralized databases containing identifiable information about children and families create lasting privacy and cybersecurity risks. The Department estimates more than $1.5 million in first-year staffing costs for the birth-defects registry and expects to seek CDC support.

Before authorizing any such system, lawmakers should require a demonstrated public need, strict limits on data collection and secondary use, transparent costs, independent security audits, parental notice where appropriate, defined retention periods, de-identification standards, and an absolute prohibition on discriminatory or coercive use.

The Commonwealth should not impose sweeping new regulations across nearly every sector of society without first demonstrating a clear need, accurately assessing the costs, establishing reasonable exemptions and compliance protections, and requiring legislative review of the economic impact.

The reporting, recordkeeping, exclusion, access, and compliance burdens would affect medical practices, laboratories, schools, childcare providers, employers, and taxpayers—with small organizations hit hardest because they have fewer compliance resources and less capacity to absorb added costs and disruption.

Existing § 27.191 authorizes the Department to impose permit and related requirements on the importation of animals and animal products during a public health emergency. The proposal would replace that framework with authority to restrict the movement (imported or not) of animals, animal products, and animal-related materials either during an emergency or to prevent one. Covered materials would include, but not be limited to, animal bedding, carcasses, feed, waste, animal-care equipment, and food products made from animals. Restrictions could be imposed when these animals or products are “suspected" to be contaminated by a pathogen that poses a threat to human health. Because the proposal does not define the evidentiary standard for “suspected,” explain how serious or imminent the threat must be, or specify procedural protections for affected owners and producers; products such as eggs, raw milk, and unpasteurized cheese could potentially be restricted. Clear standards, prompt review procedures, and protections against unnecessary disruption are needed to safeguard farmers, small producers, and consumer choice.

Current § 27.87(c) provides that treatment approved by the Department or a local health authority may include care by an accredited practitioner of a well-recognized church or religious denomination that relies exclusively on prayer or spiritual means for healing, provided applicable sanitation, isolation, and quarantine requirements are satisfied. The proposal would delete this provision. The Department describes the change as a clarification, explaining that it relies on evidence-based treatment and would approve religious or spiritual treatment only to the extent that it is evidence-based. Because § 27.87 permits institutional isolation of a person with a communicable disease who refuses approved treatment, removing the regulation’s express recognition of religious treatment could materially limit the accommodation available to people whose sincere religious beliefs prohibit conventional medical care. At minimum, the deletion raises serious religious-liberty and free-exercise concerns and warrants clearer standards explaining how sincere religious beliefs would be accommodated while protecting others from infection.