Free beer, Krispy Kreme donuts, gift cards, parks passes, university scholarships, theatre memberships and lottery tickets; there's no shame or reluctance on behalf of US authorities either federal or state in appealing to their constituents' more basic instincts with brash incentives to get the national mass vaccination job done.

They are sticking needles in people's arms in baseball stadium carparks, outside Disneyland, in churches, and on buses.

Such is the contrast of daily life for citizenry across the US, the extraordinary national push to achieve President Biden's promised "summer of freedom" is all happening against a backdrop of some 17,000 fresh cases of COVID-19 recorded a day.

But for the Americans, it's a weight of numbers game; they know that if they keep pushing hard enough, they will put a lid on this thing. The prospect of re-embracing a long, languid mid-year summer break means that much to them.

And if there's free beer on offer, too; well, who wouldn't?

All of which makes Australia's plodding vaccination effort seem a little lame by comparison.

The exhortations of our political leaders and health experts have come thick and fast but the Australian public's level of commitment to the vaccination effort has fallen well short of our friends across the Pacific.

So what's gone wrong? And how do we fix it?

For a start, the federal government botched the basics: that is, to get all front-line workers - cops, ambos, firies and interstate truckies hauling food up and down the highways - and our oldest and most clinically vulnerable fully identified, prioritised and protected.

It was almost unbelievable to discover that as Victoria prepared to enter another lockdown period late last month, 16 aged care homes still hadn't even been visited by the public health vaccination teams.

While the federal government seems bereft of ideas, the ACT government's problems are a little more fundamental.

The ACT government has, to its credit, boldly forged ahead with initiatives in some key policy areas.

However, in critical matters of public health, it's unwise to raise expectations which cannot be matched by reality.

Leaping ahead to open the administration of the Pfizer vaccine to people in the 40-49 year category seemed like a good idea at the time, until the phones starting ringing. And ringing.

Hang-ups, call drop-outs, and failures to connect were common on the overloaded switchboard as thousands of ACT gen-Xers rushed to jump on the vaccination train.

A record number of bookings - 5394 in all - were taken by the ACT vaccination team on Thursday.

That's a brilliant effort but equally many customers were left frustrated and annoyed by technical glitches. These are issues that should have been foreseen and resolved before the "go" button was pushed.

Vax The Nation, a campaign promoted by this newspaper and others across the ACM group, is under way. In the absence of free beers on Mr Morrison, it's our way of lending our support to the national effort to drop the curtain finally on this tiresome threat to public health.

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