22:57 12 May 2021
Piloting vaccine passports in EU without Poland
The IT system test for EU vaccine certificates has started. The tests of the system that will enable vaccinated people to travel freely will take two weeks, writes Rzeczpospolita daily on Wednesday. Poland did not come to the tests.
The daily reports that every day two countries will be connected on a trial basis to the central system commissioned by the European Commission by Deutsche Telekom and SAP. France and Malta were the first to do so on Monday, and a total of 18 EU countries and Iceland will be tested by the end of next week.
"Poland did not apply for the tests. It is unofficially known that apart from us, Slovakia, Slovenia, Romania, Hungary, Latvia, Portugal, Finland, and Ireland are still not ready," Rzeczpospolita reads.
“The pilot includes testing the ability of Member States to connect to the EU portal, loading and retrieving public keys needed to verify the certificate, and security testing,” Johannes Bahrke, spokesman for the European Commission, said.
"Residents of individual countries do not take part in the pilot – artificial data and public keys are used. The system is to work offline, which means that none of the officials checking the certificate will have access to the database. It will only check the authenticity of the generated QR code," the daily wrote.
