Kansas Attorney General Kris Kobach has become the second state attorney general to sue the pharmaceutical company Pfizer over the COVID vaccine the company provided.

On Monday, Kobach announced the lawsuit at a press conference in Topeka.

“Pfizer made multiple misleading statements to deceive the public about its vaccine at a time when Americans needed the truth,” Kobach said.

The lawsuit states, “Pfizer misled the public that it had a ‘safe and effective’ COVID-19 vaccine. Pfizer said its COVID-19 vaccine was safe even though it knew its COVID-19 vaccine was connected to serious adverse events, including myocarditis and pericarditis, failed pregnancies, and deaths. Pfizer concealed this critical safety information from the public.”

Pfizer said its COVID-19 vaccine was effective even though it knew its COVID-19 vaccine waned over time and did not protect against COVID-19 variants,” the lawsuit continues. “Pfizer concealed this critical effectiveness information from the public. Pfizer said its COVID-19 vaccine would prevent transmission of COVID-19 even though it knew it never studied the effect of its vaccine on transmission of COVID-19. To keep the public from learning the truth, Pfizer worked to censor speech on social media that questioned Pfizer’s claims about its COVID-19 vaccine. … Pfizer must be held accountable for falsely representing the benefits of its COVID- 19 vaccine while concealing and suppressing the truth about its vaccine’s safety risks, waning effectiveness, and inability to prevent transmission.”

Pfizer released the following statement in response to the lawsuit:

We are proud to have developed the COVID-19 vaccine in record time in the midst of a global pandemic and saved countless lives. The representations made by Pfizer about its COVID-19 vaccine have been accurate and science-based. The Company believes that the state’s case has no merit and will respond to the suit in due course.

Pfizer is deeply committed to the well-being of the patients it serves and has no higher priority than ensuring the safety and effectiveness of its treatments and vaccines. Since its initial authorization by FDA in December 2020, the Pfizer-BioNTech COVID-19 vaccine has been administered to more than 1.5 billion people, demonstrated a favorable safety profile in all age groups, and helped protect against severe COVID-19 outcomes, including hospitalization and death.

Patient safety is our number one priority, which is why we follow diligent safety and monitoring protocols.

Last November, Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton filed a lawsuit against Pfizer.

NATO members are debating deploying more nuclear weapons to counter rising hostile powers, especially China, according to NATO’s secretary-general.

NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg said the alliance is facing an unprecedented threat with a nuclear armed Russia and another rising nuclear power in China. To counter the threat and establish deterrence, the alliance is considering moving some nuclear weapons out of storage and making them operational.

“I won’t go into operational details about how many nuclear warheads should be operational and which should be stored, but we need to consult on these issues. That’s exactly what we’re doing,” Stoltenberg told The Telegraph in an interview published over the weekend.

“In a not-very-distant future,” he said, “NATO may face something that it has never faced before, and that is two nuclear-powered potential adversaries – China and Russia. Of course, this has consequences.”

The secretary-general said that, unlike in years past, NATO should embrace transparency about its nuclear capabilities. Transparency is the key to deterrence, he said.

“Transparency helps to communicate the direct message that we, of course, are a nuclear alliance,” Stoltenberg said. “NATO’s aim is, of course, a world without nuclear weapons, but as long as nuclear weapons exist, we will remain a nuclear alliance, because a world where Russia, China, and North Korea have nuclear weapons, and NATO does not, is a more dangerous world.”

China in particular worries the NATO chief. Beijing’s stockpile of nuclear warheads could grow to 1,000 by the end of the decade. The Chinese military is investing heavily in other forms of advanced weapons, as well, Stoltenberg said.

NATO has 32 member countries, but only three of those are nuclear powers: France, the United Kingdom, and the United States. Americans tactical nuclear weapons are positioned in several other countries: Belgium, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, and Turkey, according to Politico.

Among NATO members, the U.S. has the largest stockpile of nuclear weapons at 5,428. Last year, the U.S. State Department said that 1419 warheads were deployed. Russia is believed to have the largest stockpile of nuclear warheads in the world at 5,977. In 2022, Russia said that it had 1,549 warheads deployed.

Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov bashed Stoltenberg’s comments, calling them “nothing else but an escalation.” The Kremlin spokesman went on to add that Russian President Vladimir Putin does not talk about nuclear weapons “at his own initiative as he takes the issue seriously,” according to Politico.