Analysis: Alarmed by Ebola, Public Isn’t Calmed by ‘Experts Say’

NEW YORK TIMES                        NOV. 1, 2014
By RICHARD PÉREZ-PEÑA
When public health leaders and government officials make the case against isolating more people returning from the Ebolahot zones in West Africa, or against imposing more travel restrictions from that region, time and again they cite science and experts. It isn’t working very well.

Many support the efforts of Gov. Paul R. LePage of Maine to isolate a nurse who treated Ebola patients in West Africa. Credit Craig Dilger for The New York Times

Polls show the overwhelming majority of Americans favor quarantine in cases like that of Kaci Hickox, the nurse who was held against her will in a Newark hospital on the orders of one governor and has fended off the efforts of another governor to sharply restrict her movements. Some prominent conservative commentators dismiss the assurances of scientists, Obama administration officials and the news media as unreliable, elitist blather.

...This comes on top of a broader mistrust of elites. “Skepticism about science and expertise and authority has a pretty big constituency out there,” said Ross K. Baker, a professor of political science at Rutgers University. It is not enough for policy makers to be right on the science, he said; they must also find a way to reassure “people who are all too ready to interpret expert opinion as elitist and condescending.” 

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http://www.nytimes.com/2014/11/01/us/alarmed-by-ebola-public-isnt-calmed-by-experts-say-.html?_r=1