On January 21, Steffen Löhnitz held an outdoor press conference in central Vienna. The German activist was eager to defy the cold to share his research into coronavirus infections with the German and Austrian “alternative” media that showed up. He accused the Austrian government of deliberately inflating infection numbers to usher in a lockdown, and compared it to “a criminal organization.” Amplified by the German edition of the Epoch Times, a newspaper headquartered in New York City and linked to the religious group Falun Gong, Löhnitz’s comments quickly went viral.

Since the start of the coronavirus pandemic, false or misleading Epoch Times articles about Covid have circulated widely on social media in Germany. Epoch Times reported that Löhnitz had been digging up “correct numbers” of coronavirus infections for a long time. It reported Löhnitz’s claims of “massive fraud” against the populations of Austria and Germany as fact. Figures from Germany’s anti-lockdown movement known as Querdenken shared the Epoch Times story through their network. The article was soon viewed hundreds of thousands of times on Telegram, the favored platform for Covid-skeptics and anti-vaxxers in Germany. 

“The Epoch Times has played a noticeable role in transmitting and amplifying many anti-vaccine narratives,” said Raquel Miguel, a researcher for the European watchdog EU DisinfoLab. 

Epoch Times was founded in the U.S. more than two decades ago by practitioners of Falun Gong who had fled persecution in China. And apart from opposition to China’s Communist Party, Epoch Times’s editorial was largely apolitical.