YouCongress
About Sign up

Comment by Susan R. Weiss

Human avatar
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.
Like Share on X 3h ago
Policy proposals and claims
COVID-19 originated from a lab-related incident rather than natural zoonotic spillover
votes Against
Statement relation verification history AI Verified Report this

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 · 3h ago
Vote inference verification history AI Verified Report this

Vote answer comments

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 · 3h ago

Quote authenticity verification history

Report this

Quote authenticity comments

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 · 3h ago
replying to Susan R. Weiss