We recently learned that both IOC Vice President John Coates and Japanese Prime Minister Yoshihide Suga have been taking a beating in the approval rating race due to their insistence that the 2020 Olympic Games in Tokyo will move forward. The country remains in an extended state of emergency because of the COVID pandemic and well over half of Japan’s citizens disapprove of the decision. As a solution to this dilemna, Suga announced that he would be setting up two mass vaccination sites in a pair of his country’s largest cities, attempting to develop enough herd immunity to avoid turning the games into one of the biggest superspreader events seen in the pandemic thus far.

At the time of that announcement, I asked what the prospects were for making any serious progress toward broad immunity in such a short period of time while only having two locations available. It’s looking as if those concerns were well-founded. The Associated Press is reporting that the Japanese government is now realizing that Suga’s plan is turning out to be “too little, too late.” The clock is ticking and the country simply doesn’t have the resources and infrastructure to ramp up its vaccination efforts anywhere near quickly enough.

It may be too little, too late.

That’s the realization sinking in as Japan scrambles to catch up on a frustratingly slow vaccination drive less than two months before the Summer Olympics, delayed by a year because of the coronavirus pandemic, are scheduled to start.

The Olympics risk becoming an incubator for “a Tokyo variant,” as 15,000 foreign athletes and tens of thousands officials, sponsors and journalists from about 200 countries descend on — and potentially mix with — a largely unvaccinated Japanese population, said Dr. Naoto Ueyama, a physician, head of the Japan Doctors Union.

The last thing the Prime Minister wants is for his nation to be known as the birthplace of some new “Tokyo variant” of COVID which is then carried home to essentially every nation on the planet by the tens of thousands of athletes and officials expected to arrive for the games. His name would replace Typhoid Mary’s in the history books for anyone who’s able to pronounce it correctly.

Suga has already scaled back his goal to the point of only trying to vaccinate the nation’s 36 million senior citizens by the end of July. (At which point the games will have already been underway for a week.) But they aren’t really even close to making that modest milestone at this point. And the other 70% of the country’s population will stil be entirely unvaccinated aside from a few senior officials and frontline medical workers.

To its credit, Japan has managed to ramp up to the point of doing 500,000 shots per day in a few weeks. Suga is shooting for increasing that to one million per day by the middle of June. But those are still only the senior citizens in two major cities. Pretty soon they will be running out of eligible patients and need to find a way to extend the mass vaccinations to more far-flung locations around Japan’s various islands. The infrastructure isn’t in place yet to do that and they only have roughly six weeks before people begin arriving.

So what’s the answer? The Japanese government hates losing face and it would be seen as a huge embarrassment if they had to turn around now and delay the games again after so strongly vowing to pull this off. But is there an alternative? If they simply throw caution to the wind, we’re back to the “Tokyo variant superspreader” scenario I discussed above. I suppose they could switch tactics and simply try to vaccinate as many people as possible in the immediate vicinity of the locations where the games will be held, particularly those in the foodservice and entertainment industries. Then they could impose some draconian travel restrictions ensuring that none of the visitors travel more than a few miles from stadiums and their hotels. But at that point, they would have eliminated virtually any benefit they expected from hosting the games to begin with.

I’m really not seeing a good outcome here for Japan at this point unless they just cancel the games entirely. (And that’s not really a “good” outcome for them either.) But they should have realized long before now that their vaccination goals were likely out of reach. So if anyone will bear the blame for this mess it will likely be the Prime Minister.