Are lockdowns justified?

[The Grand Nudger]

The lack of any american policy killed hundreds of thousands.

First of all, the US has had, and still has, many policies to address COVID. Some of them are now almost universally agreed to have been counter-productive, such as putting COVID patients into nursing homes, and then manipulating the statistics to make it look like fewer people in nursing homes died from COVID. Some of those policies are still supported by many people, such as long-term lockdowns and mandatory mask-wearing. Texas is, as far as I know, the only US state without such policies.
Secondly, how do you know which policies are good and which are not? How would a scientifically valid study to determine that even be designed? Lockdowns are not a single policy, they are a bunch of policies, and certainly at least some of them are bad. I think a key to understanding social sciences is to assume that the economic freedom index studies are bad science. But any real lockdown study will suffer from the same flaw.

Arguing against a point by specifically describing it's factuality is a poor strategy.  

Plagues don't give a shit about anyone's politics.

Well, I agree with you. Viruses do not seem to care much about which policies the countries have. The number of people with type-2-diabetes and heart disease in a country is a lot better predictor of the mortality from COVID-19.

I think that the plague is a better indicator of mortality in plague ridden countries. A fraction of the worlds population, a quarter of all cases, half a million dead.

You wanna talk about chubby people, though. Guess what? I'd prefer that chubby people live too. Seems like there were some things we could have done better no matter who the afflicted group happens to be.

....and as far as your "work in the social sciences". Stop it. You're a conspiracy theorist engaged in denying well documented instances of ethnic cleansing that occurred within living memory.