If we can now expect the leading health experts in the world to be potentially speaking in hyperbole, then we can't expect the public to trust what they say to be accurate.
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.