I have my doubts about the flock immunity point of view. If it worked against something like flu, we would not have much flu these days after having had it regularly almost every winter for over a century. Yet we still have flu - less with those who observe the hygiene and wear clothing appropriate to the season.
The RIVM says that counter-intuitively, the more people have received the flu vaccine the worse outbreaks get. Because then there's less herd resistance. As such the yearly flu vaccine should be given primarily or perhaps even exclusively to risk groups for best results.
It illustrates how reality can damage credibility of our free media, directly owned or sponsored by a handful of (unbiased
) billionaires.
I don't see how, unless you mean that China was rated significantly too highly. Detaining doctors for spreading "false rumors" evidently wasn't part of the rankings. Snark somewhat aside, Forbes' clickbait "most prepared" heading clearly means "less badly prepared." That's why it's yellow rather than green. And did you look at the numbers? You might notice that China ranked in the 50s rather than the 30s in large part
because of zoonotic disease risk! You know, like viruses from bats or pangolins.

The other ranking in which China negatively stands out is health care access. So setting aside that you should probably judge data on the basis of what knowledge was available at the time, I'm not sure your claim is supported regardless.
Full data set here:
https://www.ghsindex.org/The US ranks highly primarily because (if the rankings are to be believed) the risk for pathogens escaping from American labs and similar such rankings is the very lowest in the world. In actual practice one imagines there's very little difference between the top 20-30 countries in matters like lab safety but that's what you get when you do rankings I suppose. You'll note the US actually ranked quite badly in response plans, and that doesn't factor in political unwillingness. They also rank
175th in health care access. Perhaps those should weigh more heavily in the scale, especially when you refer to it as "preparedness" like Forbes did, when it's actually called the health security
index ranking. Which is a combination of many factors, and curiously enough that which would most commonly be called preparedness is precisely where the US scores terribly. The report itself is broken down into prevent, detect, respond, health, norms, risk. The US scores badly in respond and not fantastic in health. China scores badly in prevent and somewhat bad in health.
But in spite of all that, if it had been a more ebola-type thing or even more SARS-like, the other factors that make up the index would've weighed through much more heavily.
PS The Forbes article in question seems to be
https://www.forbes.com/sites/niallmccarthy/2020/01/27/the-countries-best-and-worst-prepared-for-an-epidemic-infographic/ I'm not sure how well they actually read the report they're talking about tbh; it looks to me like they took a quick glance and decided what the overall index seemed to show would be a nice combination of implicitly comforting the American audience combined with a nice compassionate we should care for Africa sentiment.