Italian Professor Giuseppe Remuzzi, the director of the Mario Negri Institute for Pharmacological Research, said in an interview in March 2020, that there had been strange cases of pneumonia in Italy as far back as November and December 2019. He believed that COVID-19 may have reached Europe even earlier than experts believed at the time. However, Chinese state-owned media took his comments out of context and used them to say that the pandemic originated in Italy rather than China, and rapidly spread this story across the internet.