Follow-up studies cost money, and you don't get any of that if you don't publish.

Agreed. Publish, but don't publicize. My remarks were aimed at the article, not the paper. This sounds like a promising, very initial, study that needs a lot more data before making claims about having found anything. Qualified headlines like 'Early study hints at..' Or 'Initial research potentially shows a promising....' would be better but even then a study with this little data should be very cautiously approached by any type of science reporting. More than mentioning it in passing as promising is probably not warranted until the n value is a lot higher and involves other teams and other methods.