French Warned About Bug That Could "Disable" Vaccination Certificate

In France, a vaccination certificate is required to enter the vast majority of public places, including restaurants, cinemas and museums, as well as public transport. All persons over the age of 16 are required to use the certificate in order to gain access to these places, and at this time, in order to have a valid certificate, it is necessary to have received a booster dose.

Vaccine certificates can be automatically deactivated if the holder has not received a booster dose within the required time frame, however, a problem has been reported that would lead to the deactivation of these certificates, even though some of these people have been vaccinated with a booster dose. This is a problem that mainly affects people who have already been infected with the COVID-19 virus. France operates on a "one infection equals one dose of vaccine" policy - meaning that if a person has been inoculated with a two-dose vaccine (AstraZeneca/Pfizer/Moderna) and is infected with Covid before or after the first dose, they do not need a second dose. However, the booster dose is indeed necessary. As an example, French President Emmanuel Macron became infected with the COVID virus in December 2020, when it was time to get vaccinated, he received a single dose, and as soon as boosters opened for under 50s in November, he had his booster shot.

In recent weeks, some people in a similar situation have received alerts by the TousAntiCovid application, warning that their vaccination certificate would be deactivated. This was mainly due to a bug in software which incorrectly interpreted the two doses - and which has since been fixed. So far, the TousAntiCovid application has shown surprisingly few glitches of softwarebut there is one problem that has affected vaccinated people in the UK. Because NHS (British National Health Service) vaccination codes only last for 30 days, TousAntiCovid will be deactivated as soon as the code expires, which means that the user must download a new QR code every 30 days from the NHS app in order to scan for TousAntiCovid and keep it active.