TEHRAN: Twitter has removed a tweet by Iran's supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei suggesting coronavirus vaccines made in the United States and Britain are "untrustworthy", saying the post violated its rules.

"Importing vaccines made in the US or the UK is prohibited. They're completely untrustworthy. It's not unlikely they would want to contaminate other nations," said a tweet posted Friday on Khamenei's English-language Twitter account.

"Given our experience with France's HIV-tainted blood supplies, French vaccines aren't trustworthy either," the Iranian leader added in the tweet with the hashtag #CoronaVaccine.

Twitter later removed the tweet and replaced it with a message that said it was "no longer available because it violated the Twitter Rules".

A spokesperson for Twitter said on Saturday that the tweet "violates... specifically our Covid-19 misleading information policy".