The Role of Business in Ending the Pandemic

The Center for International Private Enterprise (CIPE), the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, AmCham MENA, and Business Partners to Convince (BP2C) organized a session on “The role of business in ending the pandemic.” The MENA region experienced to have the highest COVID vaccination hesitancy in the world, which is considered by the WHO to be one of the top ten threats to the global health. The session aimed at inviting experts to discuss how the business community and the private sector can facilitate trust and promoting the acceptance of vaccination efforts.

The session covered various topics including, the status of COVID-19 vaccinations in the MENA region, supply, hesitancy, trends, the role of employers and the global coalition built to support, employer responses to vaccine hesitancy in the MENA region – challenges, considerations, opportunities and the role of chambers and associations in supporting vaccine acceptance in the workplace.

Eng. Mohammed Bataineh, Chairman of the AmCham MENA Council and AmCham-Jordan was invited to deliver his welcome remarks, along with Stephen Rosenlund, Deputy Regional Director MENA of CIPE and Steve Lutes, Vice President, Middle East Affairs at the U.S. Chamber of Commerce in Washington D.C.

In his remarks, Eng. Bataineh shed light on the fact that Jordan and Kuwait have the highest rates of vaccine hesitancy among other Arab countries, and the lowest vaccine acceptance globally, despite the fact that Jordan was amongst the first countries to receive vaccines, as a result of Jordan’s wise Hashemite leadership and strong international relations, especially with the United States. Eng. Bataineh also stressed on the fact that the increasing vaccine hesitancy rates in Jordan is resulted from the spread of misinformation, bad word-of-mouth, conspiracy beliefs, fear of potential side effects and the speed at which it was developed.

Moreover, Eng. Bataineh stated that “Breaking the COVID contagious cycle is extremely important to revive our economy, and this could only be done through collective effort and responsibility between the public and private sector to rise up to the challenge and have a national strategic plan to increase vaccine literacy through factual information.” Calling all MENA AmChams to start working with their members on raising their awareness on the huge difference and active role they can take to support their governments in increasing vaccination rates, through providing their members with a trusted and accurate information about vaccines in order to promote transparency and trust among the civil society.