“With the exception of the medical boards, all the authorities, or all the [organizations] in Brazil, they never wondered whether we saved lives or not. They just wanted to charge me as guilty.”

Dr. Flavio Cadegiani is one of Brazil’s leading scientists, specializing in endocrinology and sports medicine. He has published 25 peer-reviewed papers on COVID-19, including a landmark study showing a dramatic reduction in deaths and hospitalization in patients given proxalutamide, an affordable, off-label treatment.

“All the real good molecules that are out there, none of them belong to any of these pharma that try to push the vaccines and expensive drugs as treatments,” he says.

After the former president of Brazil began citing his research, Dr. Cadegiani became public enemy #1. Demonized as “anti-science,” he spent months under investigation and was ultimately vindicated by the Brazilian medical boards, which acquitted him unanimously of any wrongdoing in his clinical trials.

“I just can tell you that I used to be a very down-to-earth person, a very anti-conspiracy person. But some of the things that I really believed that did not exist, they actually do,” said Dr. Cadegiani, who considers the smear campaign against him to be a form of “sciencesplaining,” in which activists and members of the mainstream media who are not skilled in the scientific method lecture renowned practitioners such as Dr. Cadegiani about what constitutes “science.”

“When did the system go too far?” he asks. “I think that in COVID, this clearly happened.”