How to get a digital EU Covid health pass if you are vaccinated outside of Europe

If you are familiar with Covid-19 applications, then there must be one which is widely used in your country. It has your vaccination details, your test history, the situation in your country, and is needed at many places for entry. Similarly, Germany has Luca for its citizens and since June, EU launched an application which saves your vaccine certificate digitally to make travel easy between the Schenghen zone. It is called CovPass.

How to have your vaccination certificate issued in your country visible on the CovPass or how to convert your vaccination certificate into an EU digital certificate? The process is simple although it has certain steps.

First, you have to find the pharmacies that issue digital vaccine certificate in a particular city. Our first city was Baden-Baden in Germany. I found a list of pharmacies there which issue the same and emailed a few. This list can be found here.

There were a few that said that they will not convert, but one responded in the positive. It said that they need my vaccination proof with a QR code and my passport.

When we landed, this is the first thing we did. The pharmacist scanned my QR code and performed checks on their device. Then she issued me an equivalent vaccine certificate for Germany which had another QR code. All I had to do then was scan this code into the CovPass and I was done! I was now free to move in the Schenghen zone! I could also scan this code in the local Luca application which was checked at many places in Germany.

Note that I am vaccinated with Pfizer Biontech vaccine. You can only get an EU pass with certain vaccines. As far as I know, Sinopharm and Sputnik are not accepted.

We travelled to Germany, Hungary and France after this and did not have any problems. We showed our CovPass whenever asked which was quite a few times and it was easily accepted.

To find the list of pharmacies issuing this certificate will require some research. For the German list, you can look here.

There might soon be a global application to show your vaccination status. Or better still, Covid-19 will miraculously vanish from the face of the world and we will be able to jump with joy across borders without any problems.

Planning a trip during this pandemic requires a lot of research. But trust me, it is all worth it in the end!

P.s. Rules regarding Covid-19 are forever changing. This was my experience in August 2021 in Germany. Please do your research before travelling.