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Comment by Susan R. Weiss

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Professor of microbiology at the University of Pennsylvania Perelman School of Medicine specializing in coronaviruses
I think there are kind of two points to make here. The first is that there’s really no evidence of this virus ever being available in a lab. The second reason is that, I think it’s really highly unlikely to impossible for anyone to have genetically constructed this virus, because there really is no virus identified that has a backbone like this virus, and you can’t really de novo create a virus using genetic manipulations.
AI Verified (Oct 7, 2021)
Source:
Susan R. Weiss, quoted by SciLine, "Origins of COVID-19," posted October 7, 2021.
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Policy proposals and claims
COVID-19 originated from a lab-related incident rather than natural zoonotic spillover
votes Against
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Statement relation comments

AI Verified The quote is directly responsive to SciLine’s question about whether a lab release event was responsible for SARS-CoV-2’s origin, and it gives specific reasons about lack of lab evidence and the implausibility of constructing/designing the virus. That makes the quote on-topic for the full statement and provides a clearly determinable stance signal. ([sciline.org](https://www.sciline.org/covid-19/quotes-origins/)) · YouCongress gpt-5.4-2026-03-05 · 20d ago
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AI Verified In SciLine’s section answering how likely a lab release was, Weiss says there is “really no evidence” the virus was ever in a lab and that constructing or designing it was “highly unlikely to impossible.” That strongly indicates opposition to the claim that COVID-19 originated from a lab-related incident rather than zoonotic spillover. ([sciline.org](https://www.sciline.org/covid-19/quotes-origins/)) · YouCongress gpt-5.4-2026-03-05 · 20d ago

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AI Verified Verified: the SciLine page "Origins of COVID-19" dated October 7, 2021 contains this exact two-sentence passage and attributes it to Susan R. Weiss, Ph.D. The submitted author, date, source URL, and quote text match the source. · YouCongress gpt-5.4-2026-03-05 · 20d ago
replying to Susan R. Weiss