I did read the article, and saw what you were talking about; i.e. the “we don’t know”, we’re not sure”, etc. But then he adds the 2% statement which seemed to diametrically oppose everything he said before.
It’s not diametrically opposed. Think about what statisticians do... They’ll say, “We don’t know; we’re not sure, but here’s a 95% confidence interval for the quantity in question.”. Such language is the language of science.