A leading UK virologist says the lifting of suspensions of the Oxford University-AstraZeneca COVID-19 vaccine across Europe may have come too late to prevent a lasting dent to inoculation confidence across the bloc.

Muhammad Munir, biomedicine lecturer at Lancaster University, said European countries faced significant challenges in repairing the trust caused by the suspension in various countries.

"The dent has already been made and trust within the community is really low," Munir told CGTN.

"A survey conducted in France indicates that only 20 percent of the French people would like to take the AstraZeneca vaccine compared to 52 percent for the Pfizer vaccine. If confidence is low in one vaccine, it always raises questions for the other vaccines."

The European Medicines Agency reviewed the vaccine after 13 European countries suspended its use over fears of a link to blood clots. After finding that the jab was not associated with a higher risk of clots, Germany, France, Italy, Netherlands, Spain and Portugal announced plans to resume using it.

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Munir said early fears over AstraZeneca's safety – including two pauses to trials last autumn – allied to the fact that it uses an "old technology" had affected confidence in the vaccine. This was despite evidence of "no side effects [being] associated with the AstraZeneca vaccine."

The company took a virus that normally infects chimpanzees and genetically modified it to carry a portion of the COVID-19 coronavirus called the "spike protein." Other vaccines, such as the Pfizer and Moderna varieties, use synthetic messenger RNA, a variation on the natural substance that directs protein production in cells throughout the body.

Munir said the recent suspensions had damaged Europe's ability to limit the virus's spread. 

"It's very clear that every day we don't vaccinate we give the virus the chance to infect more population – and a more infected population means a higher death rate. If we look at that number, 90 percent of it has come into the cohort of people of 60 years and above.

"People aged 60 to 80 are still vulnerable if they are not vaccinated. If a new variant, or the third wave, starts to come at the level it has before, I think it's going to impact quite heavily onto Europe because the vulnerable community is not yet vaccinated."

As of Friday, a total of 24,175,984 people have contracted COVID-19 across the EU and European Economic Area, with 577,310 deaths.