I think this is assuming malice where incompetence may be a more likely explanation.
I was in the "it's just a flu" camp through early February, and then changed my mind pretty dramatically a few weeks before the U.S. (or Hacker News, for that matter) consensus shifted. It wasn't that I held an insincere belief beforehand; it's that the data initially supports two possible interpretations, and that as more data becomes available, "it's just a flu" becomes less likely and "this is a serious pandemic that will result in lots of life" becomes more likely.
For me, the critical pieces of information were details about what the Chinese definitions of "mild", "severe", and "critical" cases meant. I'd seen the death rates by age, which had a death rate of under 0.2% for people under 50 and it going up to 6-11% for > 70. I'd also seen case breakdowns where illnesses were described as 80% "mild", 15% "severe", 5% "critical", and 2% "death".
A logical conclusion to draw from that is that for 80% of cases, it really will be just a flu, an additional 15% would be a really sucky flu (pneumonia not requiring hospitalization), and 5% of mostly elderly patients require hospitalization.
The information that changed my mind was the clarification that 80% mild was broken down into 40% mild (cold symptoms) and 40% moderate (walking pneumonia), the 15% of severe cases all required hospitalization, and that hospitalization rates were not that different (factor of 2x, rather than factor of 30x) between young and old people. That and some math about how many hospitalizations that is vs. hospital beds available in the U.S, and the reports coming out of Italy that made it clear that the high death rate was not because of China's air pollution or smoking rates (both of which were reasonable hypotheses with the data available, particularly the increased male mortality and preponderance of smoking among Chinese men).
On a systemic level, it's entirely possible that the decision makers simply have not updated their mental models with this new information. There are a bunch of cognitive biases why they wouldn't: normalcy bias, unwillingness to look at unpleasant facts, and commitment bias (once they've publicly stated that it's just a flu it's hard to walk that back without looking like a fool). There's no need to assume that they're willfully spouting bullshit because they know they won't get caught. It's entirely possible that they're spouting bullshit because they believe it.