EBOWHAT?:

"Ebola has crystallized the collapse of trust in state authorities," columnist Charles Krauthammer wrote in The Washington Post. Ron Fournier, writing in National Journal, hit the same theme. "Ebola is a serious threat," he wrote, "but it's not the disease that scares me. What scares me is the fact that we can't trust the institutions that are supposed to deal with such threats, and we can't trust the men or women who lead them."

By the middle of November, the outlook on Ebola had changed dramatically. Every single person who had contracted the disease in the United States had recovered from it--thanks to care at specially equipped facilities that the U.S. government either had built previously or had, in response to the crisis, retrofitted to handle Ebola cases. The administration's decision to rely exclusively on light airport screening and self-reporting, pilloried as weak even by some fellow Democrats, had apparently done the trick. Since the imposition of those measures, not one single person had contracted the disease in the United States. In West Africa, where the epidemic had been spreading out of control, health-care workers had finally begun to contain it--thanks in part to assistance that the Obama administration had sent.

In short, the Ebola response turned out to be a clear public health success--a model for effective, responsive government action. So, of course, the earlier critics admitted their mistakes, and the media celebrated a great triumph of government policy.

Not exactly. In fact, it's hard to tell whether anybody in America noticed. Media coverage of Ebola nearly vanished in November: According to a study by Media Matters, CNN ran 146 stories on Ebola the week of October 14, when panic was peaking. One month later, during the week of November 11, it ran just five. The change at other networks was nearly identical. Public polling on the issue stopped around Election Day, so there's no way to tell whether confidence in the CDC, which had started falling during October, ever recovered. But the pundits and politicians who had attacked the agency (and the administration) for its supposedly feckless response were in no rush to apologize or hail its good works. 

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