It’s been 13 months since China shut down a region of 18 million people because of the rapid human-to-human transfer of a new strain of coronavirus.

It’s been a year since the World Health Organization declared a global health emergency because of the spread of the coronavirus and COVID-19, the disease it causes.

It’s been 11 months since California’s Gavin Newsom became the first governor to order a statewide lockdown.

It’s been eight months since the U.S. recorded its first 100,000 deaths from the pandemic.

And it’s been four months since Dr. Anthony Fauci, the federal government’s leading infectious disease expert, expressed optimism that effective vaccines would soon be available.

Against this backdrop, it is stunning that local, state and federal authorities have had a poor start getting vaccines approved two months ago into the arms of Americans. This week, Fauci said 70% to 85% of the U.S. population should be fully vaccinated against COVID-19 before the U.S. can “get back to normal.” Fact is, only about 2% of Americans are fully vaccinated now, and another 6% are partially vaccinated.

This is an unprecedented high-stakes vaccination effort involving multiple government bureaucracies, with distance learning, economic hardship and family separations wreaking havoc on all of our health. History will record that humanity rose to the occasion on the hardest part of the effort — getting vaccines approved and ready for arms in record time — but bungled the easier part, the logistics.

January saw record COVID-19 deaths in the United States (a trailing indicator, to be sure), but January also saw more than half the vaccinations supplied to states in storage, not being administered.

Israel, on the other hand, has used every vaccine available on a daily basis and loosened eligibility rules at the end of the day to prevent unfrozen doses from being wasted. The nation’s policy was adopted before the vaccines even became available.

In conversations countywide and countrywide, people are offering ideas that might, and still could, improve the vaccination process: mobile distribution centers that could deliver vaccines to housebound and other seniors, express lanes at mass vaccination sites, an organized system of volunteers who can safely drive people to sites, a massive public relations campaign across every medium of diverse groups of people touting the benefits of, and receiving, shots.

This requires a reckoning. But first this requires a better job being done, immediately.