I know a lot of people who regret getting the vaccine. Don’t know anyone who regrets not getting it. A Tweet by Matthew Yglesias @mattyglesias

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That’s it, the Tweet and the picture – together – are the joke. If you get it, you are smarter or better educated or just funnier than me, because I sure didn’t get it. I’m not sure that I even knew it was intended as a joke. But it was and it is.

Probably the place to start was with the Jews being hounded out of Europe by the Nazis. Obviously, not all the Jewish people were able to leave Europe, or even wanted to, with over six million Jewish people murdered solely for the crime of being Jewish. But a large number of Jewish people did get out and, ironically, many of them contributed to the Allies eventually beating the Nazis. One of them was a Hungarian Jewish mathematician named Abraham Wald. Wald managed to get to the US and ended us taking a job at Columbia as head of the Statistics Department. Like many immigrants, the job was below what his pay grade would have been back home, but it was a job. When the United States entered the war, Wald ended up in a wartime organization known as The Statistical Research Group and it was there that he made a major contribution to the Allied war effort.

The Statistical Research Group worked on problems like how to streamline the supply chain for material going to the Battlefield or the trajectory of bullets fired by a moving airplane and, according to the mathematician and author, Jordan Ellenberg, was a group where Milton Friedman, the future Nobelist in economics, was often the fourth-smartest person in the room. In mid-1943, or so, the military brought the airplane picture above to Abraham Wald with a question in armoring airplanes.

Armour is weight and weight is the enemy of a successful fighter plane: too much armor and the plane is too slow, and too little armor results in a plane being too vulnerable to enemy fire. The military told Wald that “The red dots are bullet holes; this is where our planes are being shot.” And they asked him, “What is the minimum amount of armor needed to protect these areas?” Wald gave them an answer they did not expect. He said, “Put the armor where there are no bullet holes.”

The planes that got hit where there are no bullet holes, didn’t come back. Statistically, this is known as survival bias. I only know one person, that I’m aware of, that refuses to take the vaccine and he hasn’t died or even gotten sick and offers this as proof that people shouldn’t be taking the vaccine. I’m sure he will feel this way as long as he remains Covid-free. Survival Bias.