Ok, I'll justify them. There is almost no chance that anyone in the saga decided to do the evil thing because they wanted to watch the world burn. Not the government policy makers nor the police who carried out their orders. Every person is doing what they believe is the right thing. Some of the people were mistaken. With the benefit of hindsight we can see that Li Wenliang was not mistaken.
How many SARS II hoaxes has the government stomped on that we never heard about. How many doctors or patients in a nation of ~billion people have misidentified an outbreak of the common cold as "the next SARS" in the last 17 years. They aggressively stamp out the embers of a rumor before it gets going and becomes a raging fire of panic. This time the government erred, it wasn't a misidentification, the virus was real. They aren't evil or corrupt or murderous. They are fallible humans and they make a mistake.