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The vaccination certificate on a smartphone: after a technical change, pharmacies can issue QR codes again
Photo: Stefan Puchner / dpa
After an interruption due to a security gap, many pharmacies should now be able to reliably issue vaccination certificates again. The new system had already gone online last week, but it kept stalling due to conversion problems. On Monday, according to the industry magazine "DAZ-Online", numerous pharmacies were unable to issue vaccination certificates, or only after a delay, due to technical problems. However, the problem has now been solved, said the Federal Association of German Pharmacists' Associations (ABDA). An ABDA spokesman told SPIEGEL that tens of thousands of digital vaccination certificates are now being accessed every hour.
The change had become necessary because security experts had discovered a serious security flaw.
They could log into the system with entirely made-up data and generate official QR codes.
The Federal Ministry of Health and the German Pharmacists' Association responded by switching off the system.
The result: the pharmacies could no longer issue any new certificates nationwide.
In the new system, the registration must be carried out using the hardware of the telematics infrastructure, only then can the pharmacy issue certificates.
The first pharmacies were already activated on Thursday.
But the system did not run smoothly.
"In the last few days the system had repeatedly to do with performance problems nationwide when it came to retrieving digital vaccination certificates," a spokesman for the ABDA told SPIEGEL.
Together, IT experts from IBM, Gematik and the German Pharmacists' Association identified and eliminated the bottlenecks in issuing the QR code.
"The system is now running reliably again and the pharmacies can call up digital vaccination certificates," explains the spokesman.
But work continues to stabilize the settlement.
The holiday season in particular is likely to fuel demand: holidaymakers who return to Germany from a country that is not classified as a risk area can also fulfill their obligation to test with a vaccination certificate.
However, if you are entering from so-called virus variant areas, an additional negative COVID-19 test is necessary.
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