2011-02-27
Explanation
This comic parodies the trope of a rogue cop action movie. A police chief yells at an officer named Brian for killing anti-vaccinationists, echoing the classic "loose cannon cop" setup. Brian coolly puts on sunglasses and delivers the one-liner "Correlation... implies casualty," a pun combining the statistical phrase "correlation does not imply causation" with "casualty" (meaning death or injury).
The joke works on multiple levels. The phrase "correlation does not imply causation" is a fundamental principle of statistics and a common rebuttal to anti-vaccination arguments, which often rely on spurious correlations. By swapping "causation" for "casualty," Brian turns a logical argument into a justification for violence. The caption notes that "sadly, there are no action movies marketed toward skeptics," imagining a world where evidence-based reasoning could be as dramatic as a Hollywood blockbuster.