The only requirement to be a "scientist" these days is to have the left-wing media call you one.
I give you.......Party-Puppy Fauci........
These days it's harder to qualify, in the public eye, as a Voodoo Priest than as a "scientist".
From his Wikipedia article
Fauci attended
Regis High School, a private
Jesuit school in Manhattan's
Upper East Side, where he
captained the school's
basketball team despite standing only 5 ft 7 in (1.70 m) tall. After graduating in 1958, Fauci attended the
College of the Holy Cross, graduating in 1962 with a
Bachelor of Arts degree in
classics with a
pre-med track. Fauci then attended medical school at
Cornell University's Medical College (now
Weill Cornell Medicine) where he graduated first in his class with a
Doctor of Medicine degree in 1966.
[6] He completed an internship and
residency in
internal medicine at the New York Hospital-Cornell Medical Center (now
Weill Cornell Medical Center).
As a physician with the
National Institutes of Health (NIH), Fauci has served the American public health sector in various capacities for more than fifty years and has acted as an advisor to every U.S. president since
Ronald Reagan. He became director of the NIAID in 1984 and made contributions to
HIV/AIDS research and other
immunodeficiency diseases, both as a research scientist and as the head of the NIAID. From 1983 to 2002, Fauci was one of the world's most frequently-cited scientists across all scientific journals. In 2008, President
George W. Bush awarded Fauci the
Presidential Medal of Freedom, the highest civilian award in the United States, for his work on the
AIDS relief program
PEPFAR.
During the
COVID-19 pandemic, under President
Donald Trump, he served as one of the lead members of the
White House Coronavirus Task Force. After
Joe Biden took office, Fauci began serving as one of lead members of the
White House COVID-19 Response Team. Fauci is additionally serving as Biden's
chief medical advisor.