evidence: The article containing this claim was published in early February 2020 and went viral on Facebook within days, receiving more than 23,000 interactions and 900,000 views on Facebook. Published by InfoWars, it states that the 2019 novel coronavirus (2019-nCoV) is man-made and that this is proven by the presence of a "pShuttle-SN" sequence in the viral genome. Identical or similar claims have been repeated in outlets such as Natural News and The HighWire. The claim is based on another article published on 30 January 2020 and authored by James Lyons-Weiler who formerly worked at the University of Pittsburgh as a bioinformatician. Lyons-Weiler claimed that a gene sequence in the 2019-nCoV genome, which he named INS1378, is similar to part of the sequence of the pShuttle-SN expression vector. pShuttle-SN was created in a laboratory as part of an effort to produce a potential SARS vaccine[1]. Based on this observation, he posited that 2019-nCoV was a man-made virus that arose from the SARS vaccine experiments. [...] Lyons-Weiler suggests option 4 to be most likely. Option 4 shows that the "INS1378" insert in 2019-nCoV has homology to pShuttle-SN, a vector used in an attempt to create a SARS vaccine. This is normal and expected, since it is based on SARS-CoV. He even states himself there is "low sequence homology" with only a 67% match (for this insert) at the nucleic acid level (as shown in the screenshots).