In January, a German engineer called Steffen Löhnitz held an outdoor press conference in Vienna attended by the Austrian and German ‘alternative’ media. Despite the cold, he was eager to share his claim that Austria had deliberately inflated the number of COVID-19 infections to justify a new lockdown, comparing the government to a “criminal organisation”.
Löhnitz’s comments soon went viral online – as might have been expected, given that both Austria and Germany have large COVID-sceptic movements. What’s more surprising, however, is that one of the media organisations playing a key role in amplifying these claims is headquartered in New York and connected to a dissident Chinese religious group.
The German-language edition of The Epoch Times – an international media company founded in the US more than two decades ago by practitioners of Falun Gong – claimed that Löhnitz had been digging up “correct numbers” of coronavirus infections. It reported his claims of “massive fraud” against the populations of Austria and Germany as fact. The story was shared thousands of times on Facebook, as well as by leading figures from the German anti-lockdown movement called Querdenken, through their public channels on the messaging platform and social network Telegram.
