The "Dilbert" death-toll

Last weekend's Dilbert comic was particularly amusing. I thought so, anyway. Apparently, I'm nearly alone in thinking that:

Recently I killed thousands more people. I don't have exact numbers yet. The problem stems from my comic that ran on 11-20-05, implying that retail stores might harvest organs from bad customers and sell them on eBay. I've received dozens of letters (long ones!) from very angry people who assure me that the Dilbert comic will reduce the number of organ donors. The concern is that people will think their parts will end up on eBay and so they won't be inspired to donate.

This would only have an impact on exceptionally dumb potential organ donors. But as you know, that's a large block of the general population. Now I have to wonder how many people are smart enough to read an entire Dilbert comic and still dumb enough to think that the first person on the scene of an accident might be there just to harvest organs for eBay. It can't be more than 1%. Let's see, we estimate 150 million people read Dilbert, so 1% would be 1.5 million. And only 10% of them might have donated an organ anyway, so I'm probably killing 150,000 people.

It's times like this when "oops" doesn't seem sufficient.

Hat tip to Samizdata.