One way to approach an announcement like this is to wait until everything is wrapped up nicely in a neat paper.
Another approach is to investigate further using the tools available: look up the authors' past work on Google Scholar, check clinicaltrials.gov, look for third party opinions, even ask the authors directly. I'd argue that the scientists and journalists at the AAAS conference where this was presented are capable of this second approach, and so are many participants on HN.
I think if you try it out, after a few you'll find this is naive. Further, you are doing the job of the person making the claim!
It is too time consuming to research a claim indirectly like that. That is what you do after reading the paper which contains (usually most of) the required information and (usually a biased sample of) citations to the other research that were found relevant.
Reading the paper is only a first filtering step to evaluating a claim, a conference presentation simply doesn't merit that effort because it contains far too little information. A conference presentation is more like "hey, check out what I'm working on".
Now, that doesn't mean people don't try to do this, it is one of the primary uses for misinterpretation of p-values.
Another approach is to investigate further using the tools available: look up the authors' past work on Google Scholar, check clinicaltrials.gov, look for third party opinions, even ask the authors directly. I'd argue that the scientists and journalists at the AAAS conference where this was presented are capable of this second approach, and so are many participants on HN.