Why does it take a year to make a vaccine?

That depends on what you mean by “innoculate the world”. That’s what we’d need to give every single person on the planet the vaccine, but a vaccine can be effective even far below that level. We’ve won the fight on smallpox without vaccinating everyone, and we’ve nearly won the fight on polio with far less yet than that.

For starters, COVID-19 is dangerous only to a small minority of people, and that proportion is correlated well with well-known demographics. So start by giving the vaccine to those most at risk, the elderly, and those most likely to catch it, medical workers. Then focus on the places that have the highest incidence of the disease. At the same time as you’re developing the vaccine, ramp up production of tests, and implement better contact tracing. More testing also means you’ll find lots of folks who already had the disease: They don’t need the vaccine. Focus on the people who have not yet contracted the disease, but are close to people who have. Even there, you don’t need to get everyone; you just need to get enough to get the average number of transmissions per case below 1.