HOLMAN JENKINS: The Ebola Anti-Hysteria Hysteria: The average American is safe, but the choices may get ugly in the coming months.

People are irrational in their assessment of risks, blah, blah. Yes, we can find here and there examples of Americans overreacting to Ebola. But more in evidence has been media’s own anti-hysteria hysteria. This week a Bloomberg Radio host rudely and repeatedly (and uncharacteristically) hushed a Wall Street analyst for suggesting we still have things to learn about how the virus is transmitted. Guess what? This is true. What’s more the virus is subject to forces of natural selection, so even our broadly reliable generalizations about transmissibility are hardly written in stone.

The media, as if citing an iron law, keep telling us that (to use the New York Times formulation) “people infected with Ebola cannot spread the disease until they begin to display symptoms, and it cannot be spread through the air.”

Sorry, each clause of that sentence is subject to caveat, and the whole thought needs to be preceded with the words “government scientists believe . . . .”

A lack of plausibility of official explanations doesn’t help matters.

You want to encourage panic? Make it sound like your top priority is fighting panic, instead of Ebola.