Surely, you can't be serious. The setting isn't a paper but a news interview, where they want the general idea of a study, not the details. In a news interview, saying "people who smoke get cancer" is perfectly acceptable (and not likely to "get people killed"), even though not 100% of them do.
Idiots on the Internet are free to do so, but not the Director of the CDC or the US President. That gets people killed.