Did the emergence of the Omicron variant impact the COVID-19 vaccine acceptance in the Arab world? A Twitter-based sentiment analysis

<ns3:p>Background Low vaccine acceptance constitutes a major obstacle for achieving herd immunity against coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19). Data on COVID-19 show a significant rise in the number of cumulative cases in Arab countries where vaccine uptake is lower than the uptake at the global level for the 2021-2022 period. The aim of this study is to analyze sentiments related to vaccine acceptance before and after the emergence of the COVID-19 Omicron variant in the Arab-speaking world. Methods Tweets were collected before and after the Omicron emergence period in the Arab-speaking world using Python-enabled CAMeL Tools (Arabic Natural Language Processing toolkit) libraries. A sentiment analysis on COVID-19 vaccines using Arabic hashtags and a sentiment analysis by city were conducted. Results Two data sets pre-Omicron and post-Omicron tweets exhibited a difference in sentiments marking a shift towards less negativity and more neutrality. Sentiments by city showed most tweets in both periods coming from Riyadh and Jeddah in Saudi-Arabia, and from Salt in Jordan. Conclusions Despite the limitations of the study, the change in sentiments detected by the study may suggest more vaccine acceptance which raises some hope and perhaps a higher vaccine uptake in the future. The sentiments by city findings may help in the design of future research.</ns3:p>