> Sure, this is true, it's one of the reasons why results being significant or not is not very relevant.
No. Significance is the only thing that matters here. If you don't have a significant result, you don't have a result. Making up stories about how the results coulda-woulda-shoulda been significant if only the study was different somehow is fine for bedtime or planning the next study, but absolutely irrelevant to interpreting the clinical trial in front of you.
The CI here is not actually that wide; I was being colloquial. It's an 80,000 person trial, with 40,000 per arm. The absolute observed difference in colo-rectal mortality between the two arms was 0.03%. The per-protocol analysis (just those people who got tested) was a difference of 0.15%.
That latter figure is the best possible argument for colonoscopy, and no matter how you look at it, it's just not a big difference. Even if you ran a huge trial to get a significant result at these effect sizes, you're still talking about a difference of 15 people per 10,000 (at best) screened. That's a lot of pain and expense for very little gain.