KING COUNTY, Washington (LifeSiteNews) – A law-enforcement veteran in the King County Sheriff’s Department took to social media to announce his resignation this week, going public with longstanding grievances against the leadership of Sheriff Mitzi Johanknecht, including her “threatening” approach to COVID-19 vaccine mandates.
Introducing himself as a 23-year veteran of the U.S. Army prior to his 10 years in law enforcement, Deputy Jessy Bailey explained in a TikTok video that despite being “motivated and ready to do my job” in the face of years of outside anti-police sentiment, it was “too much for me” when things “started to become toxic on the inside, when people stopped caring for each other on the inside, when toxic leadership like we have here in the King County Sheriff’s Office, who does not care about their deputies.”
This fully-vaccinated sheriff is resigning because he stands with the officers right to choose! 👊🏼
— Art TakingBack 🇺🇸 (@ArtValley818_) September 29, 2021
“And this message is directly for Mitzi Johanknecht, our sheriff: You failed us. And you failed us miserably,” he declared. “You should have left when the guild was asking you to. I once suggested to a senior member up there downtown when I worked downtown to do a command climate survey, and I got laughed at, they said the sheriff really doesn’t wanna know the truth to that.”
“In five combat deployments, even when I was losing soldiers, and morale was really low, I have never worked in an organization that had lower morale than we have right now,” Bailey continued. While making clear there were still some good people in leadership, he asked Johanknecht, “Do you know why your nickname here in this department is ‘Mitzing in Action’? It’s because you haven’t been here. You forgot what it was to be a cop. You’ve put people in charge who’ve never spent one day in a patrol car.”
In a follow-up interview with KIRO Radio host Dori Monson, Bailey added that a “very threatening” email Johanknecht sent out regarding the COVID vaccine mandate for government employees was a breaking point. Bailey is vaccinated himself but opposes making it mandatory.
“It was a very ‘get the shot, or get out.’ Here’s my thing, and I might know a thing about leadership,” he said. “Why couldn’t [she] say, ‘Hey, I’m sorry, guys. I’m sorry that you have to get this shot. I’m sorry. There’s been mandates by Dow Constantine and everybody else. My door is open for you, for the ones that want to talk.’”
While the department’s morale problems did not start with the shots, Bailey said it was a contributor to the current state of affairs, in which, “for the actual people that are going to calls and doing all the things we do … morale is lower than anything I’ve ever seen in 30 years of service, and the sheriff has no idea.”
“They need us, the cops, more than we need them because we are not easy to replace. The good ones are walking away,” Bailey warned. “There’s some really good ones walking away on October 19, I promise you that. And they’re not easy to replace, and we don’t want cops to be easier to replace.”
Many continue to harbor concerns that the COVID vaccines have not been sufficiently studied for negative effects given their accelerated clinical trials. Vaccine defenders note that the one-year development period was not starting from scratch, but rather relied on years of prior research into mRNA technology; and that one of the innovations of the Trump administration’s “Operation Warp Speed” was conducting various aspects of the development process concurrently rather than sequentially, eliminating delays unrelated to safety. However, those factors do not fully account for the condensing of clinical trial phases — each of which can take anywhere from 1-3 years on their own — to just three months apiece.
While cases of severe harm reported to the federal Vaccine Adverse Events Reporting System (VAERS) after taking COVID shots represent less than one percent of total doses administered in the United States, a 2010 report submitted to the U.S. Department of Health & Human Services’ (HHS) Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ) warned that VAERS caught “fewer than 1% of vaccine adverse events.” On the problem of underreporting, the VAERS website offers simply that “more serious and unexpected medical events are probably more likely to be reported than minor ones” (emphasis added).
This past May, NBC News published a report acknowledging experts’ concerns about “gaps” in federal monitoring of the COVID vaccines. While the government currently relies on a “hodgepodge” of sources for safety data, the report explained, the quoted experts call for a more “robust ‘active’ surveillance system [that] can search large volumes of patient care records to compare rates of adverse events in people who received vaccines with those who didn’t.”
Such concerns were intensified in September by a Project Veritas report showing insiders at Phoenix Indian Medical Center, a federal facility, speaking candidly about serious medical complications they’ve seen after COVID vaccination that are not being reported. Acknowledging the COVID vaccines’ potential dangers would severely undermine the Biden administration’s heavy investment in the idea that the vaccines are the key to ending the pandemic.
Instead of allaying these concerns with research, discussion, and transparency, COVID vaccine advocates have largely resorted to coercion, from the Biden administration’s mandate for public and private workers alike, to state and local mandates on police, healthcare workers, and teachers, to private employee mandates imposed by corporations such as AT&T and United Airlines.
LifeSiteNews has produced an extensive COVID-19 vaccine resource page that can be viewed here, and a resource guide on how to resist COVID vaccine mandates that can be viewed here.