You are just trying to stir the pot. You could make that claim but you would be lying, and I'm not. I also stake my reputation to this claim and you are an anonymous coward.

You latched on to the wrong part of my comment, the part that was not novel, and now you are moving the goal posts to pretend that it was about the other part of my comment.

Finally, there are several links in this thread and other threads on HN on the subject pointing to articles supporting the novel claim, which you would have found if you really cared, (such as the comment I replied to) rather than that you are just pretending to keep the standard for evidence on HN to your personal level. I have no particular reason to disbelieve a government official making a claim like that in a parliamentary setting. I am not asking you to believe the claim, merely that I am passing it on with high fidelity.

If you choose not to believe that I am fine with it, but I am not in your pay, have given you ample opportunity to study the matter for yourself, no excuse for laziness in the times of wikipedia and the rest of the web, and yet, here you are pretending you have some kind of high ground and using all kinds of slurs. 'baseless assertion' (which it isn't, I've given you my source), 'random guys' (which I'm not, but you are), 'all kinds of nonsense' (this isn't nonsense), 'wild claim' (this isn't a wild claim at all, it is actually quite expected), 'cower' (see any cowering?).

That's a lot of suggestion that you are doing, all of which is trying to shed a negative light on something that is not controversial at all, merely something that you didn't know about yet. Which means you probably don't know all that much about biology to begin with.

It's ok that you didn't know something. It's not ok to not want to then correct that by studying the subject. That's called being lazy. It's not ok to then go harassing people and doing all kinds of borderline namecalling to attempt to pick a fight about something that isn't controversial at all.

So, the coward is you. Now get off your high horse and take it as read that for many viral infections the degree of infection can be to some degree dependent on the initial viral load and that in turn can be a big factor in the development of symptoms and whether or not you will end up immune. The immune system can deal with infections in an ad-hoc manner without invoking its long term planning or it can adapt and guard itself for re-infection in the future. The exact mechanism of the cost optimization is known which you would have understood if you read that WP article I linked to above.

This is NOT controversial at all in biology circles and does not need the kind of support that you are whining for. It's like claiming water is heavier than oil or the nucleus of an atom being larger than an electron, or use of global variables being a bad practice in software development. Pick your analogy.

The novel claim was that this also applies to COVID-19, and that claim is amply sourced.

https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.03.24.20042382v...

In case you can't be bothered to read the entire pdf, this is the sentence you would be looking for:

"Stronger antibody response was associated with delayed viral clearance and disease severity."