NewsGuard Sent Us the Latest List of Our ‘Misinformation’. Here’s How We Replied

NewsGuard has been in touch again. The ‘fact checker’ founded by a Democrat activist and funded in part by Publicis Groupe, which represents leading pharmaceutical and healthcare companies including Pfizer, has sent the Daily Sceptic its annual interrogation over where its thought police have deemed that we have deviated from the approved narrative. From migrants eating wildlife to vaccines causing blood clots (though notably no climate objections this time – did we win that argument?), NewsGuard asks us to issue corrections to ensure the purity of the Official Narrative is left untarnished, even in the humble pages of the Daily Sceptic. Since NewsGuard’s completely impartial, not-at-all biased ratings are used by advertisers to blacklist companies and Microsoft to train its search engine, we thought we’d better reply, though with little hope of an improved rating given that when Toby bent over backwards to address NewsGuard’s points the first time we were contacted we saw our rating halved, as reported in the New York Post. Here’s what NewsGuard asks us this time, and our responses.

Are migrants eating swans?

Good afternoon Mr Young and Mr Jones, 

This is John Gregory from NewsGuard, a company that rates news and information websites for reliability. We assess each site based on nine apolitical journalistic criteria and assign a 0-100 trust score based on those criteria. Our rating process and criteria can be found here.

We are in the process of updating our rating of your website. As you may recall from our prior correspondence, as a part of our rating process, we contact the publication being rated to seek comment on any potential issues we find and to give the site a chance to point us to any information we may have missed.

Below, we have some questions related to a few specific criteria. Please understand that these questions are not our conclusions; they are merely questions based on our research. Getting your perspective and response to them in order to understand if we have misconstrued something or are not aware of countervailing facts is an important part of our reporting process.

We also want to make clear that these questions do not mean that we have made any final determination of the site’s rating. Our goal is to make sure our rating is as fair, accurate, and thorough as possible. We will be sure to include any comments you have in response to the questions as part of our report so that readers can see your point of view. As such, please consider this and any additional correspondence with us to be on the record.

With that in mind, for your review, here are our questions below:

1) In an October 2025 episode of the Sceptic podcast posted on the site, Daily Sceptic Associate Editor Laurie Wastell said: “Last week, [Reform UK party leader] Nigel Farage courted controversy by suggesting that Eastern European migrants and others have been eating swans in British parks as well as carp in our rivers.”

Wastell then asked guest Tom Jones, a Conservative North Yorkshire Councillor, “So now there was a chorus of condemnation for this, Tom, but the fact is there has been a lot of evidence for this kind of thing going over the past 20 or so years and well, so what do you make of all that?”

Jones responded: “The truth is there have been a lot of instances of – I think it’s not Eastern European migrants eating swans. I think those are people from not Europe. I think the people I’ve seen are generally from the subcontinent, but there has been – it’s widely acknowledged.”

In fact, the podcast’s claims that there is “a lot of evidence” and it has been “widely acknowledged” that migrants have been killing and swans in UK parks are baseless. An unnamed spokesperson for Royal Parks told the Guardian in a September 24th 2025, article: “We’ve not had any incidents reported to us of people killing or eating swans in London’s eight Royal Parks. Our wildlife officers work closely with the Swan Sanctuary to ensure the welfare of the swans across the parks.”

NewsGuard did not find any reporting from credible news outlets that migrants were killing and eating swans in London’s Royal Parks or other parks in the UK. Several other news outlets, including Full Fact, reached similar conclusions in their reporting.

Do you have any comment on this apparently countervailing information and why it was not included in the podcast?

Daily Sceptic response: 

We are glad to see you are enjoying the Sceptic, but we must say that as a self-styled “Global Leader in Information Reliability” we are rather puzzled by your response to Episode 53. You say you haven’t managed to find “any reporting from credible news outlets that migrants were killing and eating swans”. Clearly you didn’t look very hard!

In fact, there have been many examples of migrants killing and eating swans in recent years, some of which Sceptic host and Associate Editor Laurie Wastell listed in a piece in the Spectator on September 26th (or do you not consider the world’s oldest magazine a “credible news outlet”?) Another article appeared in the Telegraph to this effect.

Laurie noted the following stories:

• “Carcasses and piles of feathers found next to cooking pots at migrants’ camp”, wrote the Daily Mail in 2008.
• In 2013, Sky News reported that a Queen’s Swan had been ‘found cooked near Windsor Castle’.
• “Immigrant was cooking swan amid bird bodies” – the Standard, 2012.
• In 2014, a convicted swan killer told the Standard: “I like the Queen and didn’t know what type of bird it was… but it tasted nice.”

Do these count as “credible news outlets”, or is it only the Guardian that gets NewsGuard’s imprimatur of truth?

In any case, the Guardian has itself reported on the harms to UK wildlife in recent years of mass migration. “Poles lead plunder of Britain’s carp,” it reported in 2007. In 2023 it noted that between 2020 and 2022 police had recorded a 59% increase in crimes against swans, ducks and geese, with nine decapitated swans among the 62 victims. Indeed, even if it’s only Left-liberal outlets you view as “credible”, Laurie’s contention that there is “a lot of evidence for this kind of thing going over the past 20 or so years” is also supported by the Independent’s reporting on this issue. On September 24th it quoted the Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (RSPCA), which confirmed that a viral video where an agent investigates a migrant family suspected of hunting and cooking a swan is real. The fact that this horrifying episode was from 15 years ago situates it well within Laurie’s stated timeframe.

You cite Full Fact, but in its entry on the story, even this heavily Left-liberal partisan so-called fact-checking organisation admits that “reports of swans being caught and eaten elsewhere have appeared in the media over the years”. While it feebly adds that “in many the identity of those responsible was not verified”, this of course implies that in several cases, the reports were verified, some of which it goes on to list.

Meanwhile as Laurie also noted in the Spectator, in recent years “plenty of videos can be found on social media which show people making off with UK wildlife. Take the man walking along a bridge holding a swan. Or the man carrying a goose in a lift”.

Are chemicals in the water turning people trans?

2) In a July 2025 episode of the podcast, Charles Cornish-Dale spoke about a March 2010 study done in frogs that was published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), and stated:

So I talk about the gay frogs controversy and about endocrine disruptors, and I say, look, like all of this is actually very plausible. Everything that Alex Jones was saying was totally plausible, backed up by science, backed up by what we know about sexual development, how it actually works on the basis of hormones, and the fact that if you interfere with the ratios of particularly testosterone to oestrogen at key points in human development from conception, so including in the womb, you can have all sorts of terrible effects from, you know, like genital malformation to, you know, like reproductive reduced fertility, reduced testosterone levels, rare forms of cancer, uterine cancer, testicular cancer. So all on paper, not only on paper, it’s also substantiated, but on paper the idea that these chemicals could be causing transgenderism in humans and not just animals.

In fact, there is no evidence that atrazine can cause ‘transgenderism’ in humans. The 2010 study’s author, Dr Tyrone B. Hayes, told PolitiFact in June 2023: “There are no data to really make that link [between atrazine in the water supply and gender dysphoria or changes in sexual orientation]. That’s speculation,” adding that there are many differences between humans and amphibians like frogs that further complicate the supposed link, such as the fact that amphibians have more permeable skin.

Multiple experts have also stated that there is no evidence that atrazine can change humans’ gender identity or sexual orientation. Dr Andrea Gore, Professor of Pharmacology and Toxicology at University of Texas at Austin, told CNN in June 2023: “I don’t think people should be making statements about the relationship between environmental chemicals and changes in sexuality when there’s zero evidence.”

Additionally, Dr Stuart Haylock, a biochemist at Imperial College London, told Vice in 2017: “It’s a very long way from saying chemicals in the water are changing people’s DNA and changing their sexuality,” adding, “There is absolutely no evidence that this is the case.”

Do you have any comment on this apparently countervailing information and why it was not included in the podcast?

Daily Sceptic response:

It is rather bizarre to go to such lengths to criticise something one of our guests has said while entirely neglecting to mention the subsequent part of the podcast in which he backs it up with evidence. After the section you cite, Dr Cornish-Dale discusses a 2024 study – that is, after all the sources you cite – titled ‘Early Female Transgender Identity after Prenatal Exposure to Diethylstilbestrol: Report from a French National Diethylstilbestrol (DES) Cohort’ and published in the Journal of Xenobiotics. Contrary to the claims you cite denying any link between environmental chemicals and abnormal sexual development in humans, this study showed a highly elevated incidence of transgenderism in a cohort of French individuals who were exposed in utero to the xenoestrogen diethylstilbesterol i.e., an endocrine disruptor.

Immediately following the section you quote, Dr Cornish-Dale sets out its findings:

I mean, that’s prima facie, you know, there’s a good case for that [from the 2010 study on frogs].

Well, there was a study as well. So there’s a recent study, and I talk about this in the book that shows a very clear link between exposure to an endocrine disrupting chemical during gestation. So in the womb and massively, massively elevated rates of transgenderism. So I think it’s as far as I can tell, it is the first study that’s ever really actually substantiated this.

So it’s a study of this synthetic form of oestrogen called diethylstilbestrol. And it was given, from about from the 1950s to, I think, the 1970s, to women, pregnant women who had a history of miscarriages. And it was given to them, supposedly, you know, to prevent them from having a miscarriage. But actually, what it did was it led to all sorts of horrible birth defects and it was discontinued.

Rare cancers, all this kind of stuff. But this new study, which is a study, I think, of boys in France, shows that boys whose mothers were given diethylstilbestrol while they were in the womb have a massively, massively elevated risk of being transgender. So there’s a clear correlation, which is obviously a causal suggestion that actually exposure to endocrine disrupting chemicals could, could definitely be responsible for increased incidence of transgenderism.

You suggest there is “zero evidence” of the link between environmental chemicals and human sexual development, but this is not true. First, there is Dr Hayes’s 2010 study which suggests prima facie that there could be a link between chemicals and sexual development, as Dr Cornish-Dale notes (when you cite Dr Hayes in 2023 – after the issue has become heavily politicised, as noted in the podcast – all he says is that “There are no data to really make that link. That’s speculation.” This by no means rules out a possible link.) Second, now we do have data. The 2024 study which Dr Cornish-Dale cites shows, as he puts it, “a clear correlation, which is obviously a causal suggestion that actually exposure to endocrine-disrupting chemicals could definitely be responsible for increased incidence of transgenderism”.

Do you have any comment on this clearly countervailing information and why it was not included in your tedious complaint?

Are Covid vaccines causing miscarriage?

3) A June 2025 article, titled ‘Miscarriage and Pregnancy Loss Rates 43% Higher Than Expected After Covid Vaccination, New Study Finds’, reported that an Israeli study had found receiving a COVID-19 early in pregnancy caused higher rates of miscarriages and stillbirths.

The article stated, “Women vaccinated in early pregnancy (weeks 8-13) had a higher-than-expected number of foetal losses”, stating the pregnancy losses were “43% higher than expected” in women who received their first Covid vaccine dose between weeks eight and 13 of pregnancy compared with pregnant women who received a flu vaccine.

The article goes on to present these statistics as proof that Covid vaccines caused the pregnancy losses, stating:

One of the things we note in the conclusion of the paper is how easy it was to miss the safety signal, in part because relatively few women are vaccinated in early pregnancy and the calamitous results of that were spread out over the entire pregnancy, encompassing both miscarriages and stillbirths.

In fact, the June 2025 Israeli study, which was posted online as a preprint  — a preliminary version of a study that has not yet been published in a peer-reviewed scientific journal — acknowledged that its methods cannot prove that Covid vaccines cause pregnancy loss, stating in its ‘Limitations’ section that its analysis “is appropriate to detect potential safety signals but not to infer a causal relationship between vaccination and increased or decreased foetal loss rates or quantify the magnitude of such potential impact”.

Experts not involved with the study also said it could not prove that the Covid vaccine had caused the increased pregnancy loss. Victoria Male, a reproductive immunologist at Imperial College London, told NewsGuard in a June 2025 email that many peer-reviewed studies “have found no association between COVID-19 vaccination and pregnancy loss and I do not believe the analysis presented in this preprint is sufficiently robust to suggest an effect that all this previous work has missed”.

Indeed, numerous peer-reviewed studies have found that Covid vaccination is not associated with an increased risk of pregnancy loss such as miscarriage or stillbirth. For example, a November 2023 study published in the peer-reviewed British Journal of Obstetrics and Gynaecology analysed 240,000 pregnancies and compared pregnancy loss rates among women vaccinated for Covid and unvaccinated women. The study concluded that “[Covid] vaccination was not associated with miscarriage while accounting for the competing risk of induced abortion. This study reiterates the importance of including pregnant women in new vaccine clinical trials and registries, and the rapid dissemination of vaccine safety data.”

Moreover, experts also said that the Israeli study did not account for other factors outside of Covid vaccination that could have affected women’s risk of pregnancy loss. Jeffrey Morris, Director of the Division of Biostatistics at the University of Pennsylvania’s Perelman School of Medicine, explained in a July 3rd 2025 X post that over 90% of the women in the study that were vaccinated during weeks eight to 13 would have received their first vaccine dose in late December 2020 or early 2021, at a time when Covid vaccines in Israel were typically only given to pregnant women at high risk of Covid exposure or were more susceptible to severe Covid infection. 

Do you have any comment on this apparently countervailing information and why it was not included in the article? 

Daily Sceptic response:

Dr Josh Guetzkow, the author of the article and one of the co-authors of the study, replies:

The article mentions that “previous studies have missed this” while the pre-print itself includes a more thorough review of previous relevant studies, notes that few have found any issues, and also explains the methodological shortcomings of existing studies. The article printed at the Daily Sceptic also discussed their methodological shortcomings. Note that neither Viki Male nor Jeffrey Morris provide a substantive rebuttal to our critique, signalling tacit agreement with it.

Jeffrey Morris’s statement is incorrect. Most of the women in the 8-13 cohort were vaccinated following the recommendation to vaccinate all pregnant women at all stages of pregnancy. Moreover, we publicly corrected him on X.com when he brought up this point, but it is unfortunately repeated here without noting our rebuttal.

Are Covid vaccines causing strange white blood clots?

4) A May 2025 article, headlined ‘Worldwide Embalmer Survey Reveals Striking Rise in White Fibrous Clots Following COVID-19 Vaccination’, stated, “The latest Worldwide Embalmer White Fibrous Clot Survey — a multi-year investigation documenting the sudden and widespread appearance of anomalous clots in the deceased – has revealed a striking rise since COVID-19 vaccination.”

The article went on to quote an article from TheFocalPoints.com, which said that a survey of “301 embalmers” from multiple countries found that 83% of survey respondents “reported seeing large, white, fibrous clots in corpses during 2024 — up from 73% in 2023”. The article added, “Embalmers stated they had never observed these clots before 2021, coinciding with the introduction of COVID-19 vaccines.”

However, embalmers and funeral directors are not qualified to draw any conclusions about Covid vaccines, blood clots and whether they were the cause of an individual’s death, National Funeral Directors Association spokesperson Jessica Koth told NewsGuard in a January 2024 email. Koth said, “Funeral directors do not have access to an individual’s medical or vaccine history and are not trained to draw conclusions about an individual’s cause of death – that responsibility falls to medical examiners, coroners and physicians.”

Koth also noted in her January 2024 email that there are an estimated 37,000 licensed embalmers in the US. Therefore, the 301 unverified responses to Haviland’s 2025 online survey would represent a small fraction of embalmers just in the US.

The Mayo Clinic states on its website that blood clots can stem from a range of conditions, including obesity, smoking, heart failure and COVID-19 itself. According to the McGill University Office for Science and Society, clots also commonly form after death — due to blood separation and substances used in the embalming process — and can additionally form when a body is refrigerated, as it would be at a mortuary.

Claims that funeral service workers were finding unusual blood clots in COVID-19 vaccine recipients were first popularized in the 2022 anti-vaccine documentary Died Suddenly. Dr Erin Burnett, an Assistant Professor of Medicine at Columbia University, told MedPage Today in November 2022 that the clots “look like very common postmortem blood clots, and I feel like it was just the shock and awe value of using these images of blood clots taken out of context to scare people”.

Do you have any comment on this apparently countervailing information and why it was not included in the article?

Daily Sceptic response:

A number of experts have confirmed to the Daily Sceptic that such clots have been seen well before Covid, but their frequency has almost certainly genuinely increased in the last few years. They are also quite distinct from normal postmortem clots (both in structure and content). The experts say it’s reasonable to assume they are triggered by abnormal processes occurring at the vessel wall and research should be done to review prior literature on this phenomenon. While our experts have not seen any evidence of a causative connection to Covid vaccines – the temporal history could equally well be due to Covid itself, or Covid-vaccine synergy, or something else completely – absence of evidence is not evidence of absence and this clot topic may well turn out to be one of the major enduring harms from the Covid era. There certainly remain a number of questions around these clots, and some well-funded proper research investigations are needed to look objectively at both the living and the deceased and any connection with Covid and vaccines, among other factors. 

One scientist told us:

“We don’t have any data on whether the increase in clots is only in those who had the vaccine or Covid or in those who had neither. However, it does appear that there is a genuine increase and we should investigate the reason as it is significant for public health. We don’t know if these clots are causing deaths or just present without causing harm. If they are causing deaths then there is a public interest to find out what they are, why they are there and if we can do anything about them.”

Another said:

“There’s a clear mechanism of action (e.g. spike binds fibrinogen and presumably stimulates conversion to fibrin clots). There’s been clear action to remove certain vaccines from the market due to clotting. There is a small but clear signal of extensive clotting being reported by the embalming community. The only reason not to investigate this further is if you are scared that it might be true!”

In publishing the article, which is a preview of an article published by Nicolas Hulscher on Dr Peter McCullough’s Focal Points Substack, the Daily Sceptic was not claiming that Covid vaccines are causing the reported unusual clots. We were simply reporting on the facts of the survey and the claimed correlation with the Covid period as well as the worries of the survey authors that this may point to an under-investigated vaccine pathology. 

For clarity, we have now added a note at the bottom of our article saying that the Daily Sceptic does not know what is causing the reported phenomenon but we believe it should be investigated as the embalmers are raising potentially worrying concerns. Presumably NewsGuard would be in favour of that and so we challenge you to join us in publicly calling for such objective research to be conducted.

Corrections

5) Regarding corrections, we found that the site has published three corrections in the past year, most recently in February 2025.

Are there any other more recent corrections we may have missed? And do you have any comment on the articles and podcasts above and why they have not been corrected?

Daily Sceptic response:

The Daily Sceptic adds corrections to all articles where errors are brought to our attention. We have added a note on one of the articles mentioned above clarifying our editorial position. We have also responded in detail here to all other points raised above.

Editorial line

6) Our reviews have previously noted the site’s disclosure of its perspective on scientific topics. However, the About page does not disclose a specific political perspective, but we found articles regularly include opinionated statements criticising Left-leaning political parties and protesters in both the UK and US, without being labelled as opinion. 

For example, an October 2025 article, headlined ‘Britain Needs a New Backbone’, said of the October 2025 Manchester synagogue attack that two killed two people, “[UK Prime Minister] Keir Starmer and the Labour party have blood on their hands from years of appeasing Islamists and antisemites.”

The article later stated: “A fish rots from the head. Starmer calls [Reform UK party leader Nigel] Farage unpatriotic while tolerating violence, intimidation and hate in the streets he claims to lead. A man who can find his way to a lectern, but not to a backbone.”

Another October 2025 article, titled ‘GDP Growth? No, We’re Already in a Recession’, stated that “the illusion of economic growth is being created by massive Government borrowing to pay for the three areas in Britain which really are experiencing impressive growth – the increase in the number of people being signed off sick, the increase in illegal migration and the huge inflation-busting pay rises given to the ever-increasing number of Labour’s chums in the public sector”.

A third October 2025 article, titled ‘No Kings, No Thrones, No Crowns… No Problem’, criticised the October 2025 ‘No Kings’ protests against US President Donald Trump, stating: “All that I can take from Sunday’s proceedings in DC is that Trump Derangement Syndrome is alive and well.”

Does Daily Sceptic have any comment regarding its political perspective, how that perspective is disclosed to readers, and its approach to separating news from opinion?

Daily Sceptic response:

The Daily Sceptic is primarily an opinion site (a blog) and our reporting of news often includes editorial comment. Our ‘About‘ page gives details about our editorial angle:

So the Daily Sceptic includes sceptical articles by disaffected journalists and academics – including citizen journalists and independent scholars – about a range of public policies that are supposedly based on science or data or evidence, where ‘the Science’ is being invoked as a source of unassailable authority, but which often appear to be rooted in a covert political agenda. The idea is to challenge the new powerful class of government scientists and public health officials – as well as their colleagues in universities, grant-giving trusts, large international charities, Silicon Valley and the pharmaceutical industry – that emerged as a kind of secular priesthood during the pandemic, providing not just ‘scientific’ advice but moral guidance, too.

The “political agenda” of the “new powerful class” is of course a Left-wing one, being focused on reinforcing state control over the lives of citizens with the aim of advancing various ‘world-saving’ and ‘social justice’ agendas. Indeed, these agendas are often not covert in any way, with the political leanings of those who predominate in the bureaucracies of the state and its quasi-governmental satellites being well-known and rarely hidden. We would not identify as a ‘Right-wing’ publication, but our pro-freedom, pro-evidence editorial stance will typically lead us to criticise many of the ideas and agendas emerging from the Left and those who are pushing and defending them.

This is the third time we have engaged in good faith and at length with you and NewsGuard, pointing out that what you have identified as errors or misleading claims are nothing of the kind. We’ve also added editorial notes at the bottom of articles in an effort to clarify our editorial position and point readers to other interpretations of the same data, where relevant. A reputable fact-checking or ratings agency would respond in kind by upgrading our ranking, but we don’t hold out much hope. You don’t really care about factual accuracy or editorial transparency, do you? Those are just the supposedly neutral standards you invoke to penalise news publishers for challenging state-sanctioned, Left-wing orthodoxy. Oh, and in case you haven’t noticed – it’s not working.