There’s a reason Czechoslovakia and not, say, the U.S. did it. 1) Sabin had to conduct his research in the Soviet Union due to a lack of intellectual freedom in the United States. 2) The ideologies needed to maintain capitalist rule fostered anti-science, superstitious attitudes that led to suspicion of vaccines. 3) Czechoslovakia’s state-run health care system more efficiently delivered care than the U.S.’s hodgepodge of private providers.
Was Czechoslovakia one of many repressive bureaucratic Stalinist dictatorships? By all means. They didn’t have much malnutrition though. In fact, over more than 100 years of socialism, you saw perhaps 10 years of malnutrition in the Soviet Union and its constituent republics, another 10 in China, and perhaps 15 in N. Korea. During the same years, there were more than 30 years of malnutrition in prerevolutionary capitalist China and 100 years in capitalist India … but of course you blame socialism when a socialist country (more rarely than you acknowledge) relapses into the barbarism that is typical of the capitalist world.