I can’t understand it. Look at what Covid is doing right now. It’s fucking awful. Why couldn’t they just stay with Zero-COVID till everyone got vaccinated? Why haven’t they vaccinated everyone by now? It’s so frustrating. Who the fuck cares if someone assholes protested with blank paper? Just…why?
It's disgusting that all the reporting in the West is downright gleeful at the deaths of Chinese people and levying accusations it has no actual evidence of but I think there's a few things to consider here:
First the task of vaccinating everyone in China would be an absurd feat. Even just producing 1.4 billion vaccines in the necessary time frame for them all to be effective would be impressive. It would be a massive logistical feat to do this.
Second, China can't/won't stay closed forever. The Chinese bourgeoisie certainly wouldn't want it to and there is a question of the masses. It comes down to the fact that the rest of the world has decided to open up now and China is too integrated into the global economy to not follow suit. They aren't willing to endure what autarky would cause.
Finally I think a lot of people in spaces like this overlook the CPC's revisionism. Whether this is because of a serious commitment to Denigism and Xi thought - or an overcorrection in an effort to combat Western imperialism and misinformation varies, but the party is fundamentally a collaborationist party. They are not acting solely in the interest of the workers. Instead they are attempting to balance the interest of the Chinese masses, the Chinese bourgeoisie, and international finance capital to increase the productive forces of the country. Mao's China had massive vaccination campaigns in a more rural, less educated, and more superstitious China than today's and they were very effective, but the party has sacrificed the kind of community and radical patriotism that produced that in favor of the development of productive forces and all of the alienation that brings. They are maybe more of a functional state than anything in the West, but they do not have the ability to fully mobilize the masses in the way that was necessary to defeat this disease. I think the question of whether any lone communist party in any given country could have done it is legitimate, but the CPC is not even that.
I think you're kidding yourself if you believe 1970s era China would have done better than modern China. Barefoot doctors aren't enough to stop Covid from spreading.
I'm not sure how Mao's China would have done against this particular disease, but it should be obvious that the technical skill or equipment of medical providers had very little to do with how dangerous this disease has been. Countries with very good doctors and hospitals like the US and the UK were ravaged by it not because of their doctors, but because the masses could not be mobilized (or demobilized in a sense) to prevent the spread of disease and were in fact very easily compelled to fall in line with the bourgeoisie who did not care about the disease either through stupidity and misinformation or selfishness and greed. China in the 60s would have undoubtedly struggled to produce vaccines, masks, and to treat the worst cases, but reaching the masses and leading them in correct action in regards to other diseases is exactly what they did and there's little reason to suspect they couldn't have done it for this one either.
You're confusing necessary conditions with sufficient conditions. It's necessary to have healthcare facilities on par with your standard Western countries in order to effectively combat Covid, but as we can clearly see, it's obviously not a sufficient one.
We're talking about a time period where the average person didn't even have a b/w TV. How would "reaching the masses" even look like besides people reading about it in a newspaper? Communist cadre aren't a hivemind that instantaneously pick up whatever command Mao had in Beijing. The main difference between Covid and smallpox or TB is that Covid is an active infectious disease, so the time lag is actually critical. Compare that to today with contact tracing and being able to quickly propagate news. I think you vastly underestimate how behind Mao's China was techwise and why Deng had to do what he did.