Scammers on the dark web are offering vials of blood they allege belong to recovered coronavirus patients as a vaccine for the deadly virus, a new report has found.

NSW Chief Health Officer Dr Kerry Chant said she has been “personally horrified” by some of the alternative treatments advertised on social media and other informal online platforms.

“People should be very careful when posting or perpetrating information without fact checking it first,” she said.

Dr Chant urged Australians to follow public health advice and exercise caution around any treatments not approved by a professional health body.

“They are a lot of therapies that have been put forward to treat COVID-19. I would urge people to go to the facts and thoroughly investigate, talk to your health practitioner before doing anything that contradicts with traditional health advice.”

Researchers from the ANU’s Australian Institute of Criminology made the discovery while looking at how cybercriminals are exploiting the health crisis by selling antiviral drugs, items of personal protective equipment (PPE) and, in some cases, what they claims is human blood.

According to the research, PPE such as masks, sanitisers and HAZMAT suits accounted for two-thirds of all listings, with one user asking for more than $1700 for 10,000 ‘lab tested face masks’.

After PPE, the report found antiviral and ‘repurposed medicines’ were the next most popular dark web offering, accounting for almost half of all listings.

These include antiviral and malarial drugs such as the highly publicised, yet widely disproved, Hydroxychloroquine drug.

Purported vaccines and antidotes made up to six per cent of the listings with ‘human blood’ allegedly donated from recovered coronavirus cases among them.

Virologists are looking to antibodies in the blood of coronavirus survivors for molecular clues that can provide a design of future treatments, but there is no evidence that ingesting or injecting human blood can cure the virus.

Research head Professor Rod Broadhurst said the blood was being offered as a type of “passive vaccination”, where someone who believes they might be at risk of infection receives antibodies for the virus by injecting the plasma.

“Fake vaccines could assist in the spread of the virus because users may behave as if they are immune but nevertheless become exposed to the coronavirus,” Prof. Broadhurst said.

“The premature release of vaccines undergoing animal or human trial would also misguide users as to immunity but may also impact on the success of these crucial clinical trials.

“We really need to shut down underground sales of vaccines and experimental drugs because there are a lot of nasty side effects.”