Are we the only ones who are wondering whether the next high-level resignation from the Obama administration ought to be the director of the Centers for Disease Control over the issue of ebola? Dr. Thos. Frieden, at every turn in his appearances — yesterday, when he went before the cameras for the first time about the Texas case, and since — has seemed determined to understate the problem where he should be sounding an alarm. Afterward his first broadcast, Americans had to turn to the Drudge Report to find out just how serious this threat is and what was happening at Dallas, where the first case of ebola in America had just been confirmed.

It’s an ironical situation. We have never been a fan of the Centers for Disease Control. It is a fiercely left-wing institution that is trying to infect the entire nation with nanny-statism. It sticks its nose into everything. Why are centers for “disease control” pontificating on motor vehicle safety? Are cars some sort of infection? What’s its mandate in “adult seat-belt use”? Or “child injuries” or “teen pregnancy” to name but a few of the issues that that it pontificates on but that aren’t diseases. Yet just when we need CDC to jump in and take the lead, it offers bland assurances that we will stop this disease in its tracks.

Maybe, but no sooner did Dr. Frieden issue that bromide, than the Drudge Report lit up like a rescue ship. As we write, its leading story is illustrated with a splotch of blood where the siren often goes and its headline links to a dispatch in the Wall Street Journal on how the first ebola victim here was turned away by a hospital in Texas before eventually being taken in. At the moment, there are at least eight other ebola stories on Drudge, among them a dispatch on how the mishandling of an ebola patient was prompting a CDE alert to hospitals and another about a doctor, a microbiologist from Missouri, who fetched up at the Atlanta airport wearing an anti-infection suit to protest that the CDC was “sugar coating” the risk of the virus spreading in America.

Another Drudge headline links to a story on how United Airlines is scrambling to reach passengers, another on how cleanup workers in Dallas were balking, another on a possible case in Utah, another on Senator Rand Paul’s warning about the risk to the military, another on how the United Nations is worried about airborne infections, another of a household weary of quarantine, another about how the number at risk in Texas alone is now up to 100. Well, one could say that the government is supposed to lag the news. But how is the CDC going to get control of a situation by doing that? The CDC brass seems to have attended the Julia Pierson School of Leadership. The thing for it to remember is that the American people are not stupid. They want and deserve to be kept ahead of this story.