Reuters news agency reported on Friday that Australia has cancelled the production of a locally made vaccine against COVID-19 after trials showed it could interfere with HIV diagnosis.

Instead, the Australian government is securing additional doses of rival COVID-19 vaccines.

The makers of the Australian vaccine said that antibodies generated by the vaccine being developed by the University of Queensland (UQ) and Australian biotechnology firm CSL, one of four candidates contracted by the Australian government, were found to lead to some false positive HIV test results.

While the vaccine had elicited a "robust" immune response to the novel SARS-COV-2 virus without serious adverse effects in a Phase 1 trial with 216 participants, re-engineering a fix could take another 12 months, the developers said.

Reportedly, CSL and the Australian government had together decided to stop Phase 2 and Phase 3 trials.

CSL, which had a contract to produce 51 million doses of the UQ vaccine, will instead now produce an extra 20 million doses of the Oxford vaccine being developed with British pharmaceutical company AstraZeneca, taking the total to 53 million doses.

The Australian government said it has secured additional doses of Novavax vaccines and also has a contract for 10 million doses of a vaccine being developed by Pfizer, with regulatory approval expected by January 2021.

Reuters added that Australia's tally of 28,000 COVID-19 infections is far fewer than in many other developed countries, and with only sporadic cases of the virus now showing up, it has not raced to start vaccinations as in North America and parts of Europe.