 Even as Toyota now finds itself the target of an increasingly hyped-up inquisition about 'public safety,' skeptical consumers are asking the commonsense question: If public safety is so important, then why isn't Congress asking about the dangers of Big Pharma's deadly drugs? Toyota's problems with throttle controls and brakes haven't actually killed anyone as far as we know. Even if deaths have occurred, their number would be extremely small compared to the number of deaths caused by Big Pharma's products. FDA-approved pharmaceuticals kill nearly 270 people each day in the United States alone, and that's according to conservative calculations published in the Journal of the American Medical Association. That's equivalent to a jumbo jet airliner falling out of the sky and crashing in a giant ball of flame every single day in the U.S. If you're concerned about public safety in the United States, there's no industry that's more dangerous than the pharmaceutical industry. All the automobile manufacturers combined can't even begin to approach the body bag count produced by Big Pharma. So why is the U.S. Congress and mainstream media all of a sudden so gung-ho to accuse Toyota of compromising public safety while ignoring the far greater threat posed by Big Pharma? Because Toyota is an easy, convenient target that can distract people from the far worse dangers that no one dares speak of. As long as Americans can be distracted into focusing their fear and anger on Toyota , Big Pharma keeps on committing its crimes without being called to task. And remember: Toyota is a foreign company while the giants of Big Pharma are American companies. Congress is quick to defend U.S. companies like General Motors and Merck, even if those companies pose a very real danger to public safety . Just yesterday, selfnews.com published a story about the deliberate cover-up of deaths caused by Avandia, a top diabetes drug made by GlaxoSmithKline. According to FDA scientists, this drug is linked to 83,000 heart attacks. The company knew about this increased risk -- and so did the FDA! Yet both the FDA and GSK conspired to hide this information from the public, says the U.S. Senate committee report ( http://www.selfnews.com/028233_GlaxoSmith... ). As a result of this effort to deliberately mislead the public over the lack of safety for its drug, Avandia remained 'FDA approved' and now causes an estimated 500 heart attacks and 300 cases of heart failure every month in the USA alone. That's the body count from just one medication. Add up the fatalities from all the other thousands of medications sold by the drug industry and you start to get the picture of just how large this threat to public health really is. People are dying every day in America due to dangerous prescription medications that the FDA knew were dangerous years ago! Why medications are far more dangerous than defective vehicles For Toyota to even come close to this level of dangerous deception, the company would have to deliberately build high-explosive bombs into its cars that were randomly set off when drivers tapped the brakes. If 200 cars a day exploded into huge balls of flame on America's roads, then Toyota might start to approach the level of fatalities caused by Big Pharma's defective products. Until that happens, this whole attempt to attack Toyota over its relatively rare problems with throttle control is just a political witch hunt designed to distract people from the much larger threat to public safety posed by American companies like Merck. Fraud and corruption The real difference between Toyota and Big Pharma is that Toyota is trying to build safe cars while Big Pharma has no intention to do anything other than sell more drugs no matter how dangerous they are. In fact, Big Pharma goes out of its way to actually falsify evidence that attempts to turn dangerous chemicals into 'scientifically proven safe drugs.' It even invents fake diseases and then markets those to the public ('disease mongering') in order to sell more drugs that people don't even need! So where's the outrage against the failed consumer safety practices of Big Pharma? Senators Grassley and Baucus seem to be the only U.S. Senators who are doing anything to go after the Big Pharma / FDA conspiracy that kills so many Americans. On the House side, Congressman Ron Paul gets it, too, but few of his colleagues dare take any action against the all-powerful pharmaceutical industry. So while Big Pharma's unsafe consumer products are killing 270 people a day -- which is far more Americans than are dying from war in the Middle East -- Congress stirs up a hornet's nest of safety accusations against Toyota, a company whose unintentional errors have killed no one... and a company that has taken responsibility for fixing those errors free of charge. When was the last time a drug company offered to pay to fix the damage caused by its harmful drugs? It wasn't too long ago, you may recall, that the drug industry was pressuring the U.S. Supreme Court to grant complete immunity against all liability from all its products! How's that for ducking responsibility? Even right now, all vaccines are exempted from consumer claims of damage, thanks to laws passed by Congress that protect the vaccine industry. So while Toyota is stepping up to the plate to take responsibility for fixing its problems, the drug industry repeatedly tries to avoid any responsibility for all the pain, suffering and death it has unleashed upon the medication-taking public. In fact, getting Big Pharma to compensate even a single dollar to the damage it has caused patients normally requires a class action lawsuit . While Toyota openly offers to recall and repair all vehicles at its own cost , the drug companies actively fight any such effort with an army of lawyers! Sure, Toyota made some engineering or manufacturing mistakes. But in Toyota's case, that's a rare departure from its longstanding core philosophy of quality and safety. For Big Pharma, ducking responsibility and selling dangerous products is the status quo -- it's the way the drug industry does business every single day: Bribing researchers, falsifying data, overbilling state Medicaid programs, bilking consumers with monopoly pricing, burying negative studies that it doesn't want the public to see, paying doctors 'consulting fees' to prescribe more of its name-brand drugs, and so on. This is business as usual in the pharmaceutical industry. Can you imagine the outcry against Toyota if it were discovered the company was bribing the safety testing companies or falsifying safety testing data? The public outcry would dominate the headlines for weeks! Yet when Big Pharma does it, you don't hear a word. It's just business as usual in the criminal pharmaceutical industry, where nobody even expects these companies to act with integrity anymore. But I say to the press and the U.S. Congress if you're really concerned with consumer safety, shift your attention to Big Pharma . That's where the real crimes are taking place. That's where American consumers are being killed by defective products at a rate that makes Toyota's safety lapses seem downright inconsequential by comparison. 