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?
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.