Despite being the worst affected nation in the world by coronavirus, many Americans are unhappy with lockdown measures, claiming it is against their democratic freedom. The sentiment has even been echoed by President Donald Trump, who praised protestors who opposed the lockdowns despite overseeing more than one million confirmed cases of COVID-19 leading to more than 60,000 deaths.

Top medical experts in the country have rebuked claims that lockdown measures should be eased with things certainly going to get worse for the US before they get better.

However, now even Elon Musk has praised President Trump and lockdown protests, branding social distancing measures as “fascist”.

It would appear that the South African-born businessman has a motive for reopening businesses and putting people’s lives at risk, stating lockdown measures have put his Tesla business at “serious risk”.

Mr Musk said on a conference call: “To say that they cannot leave their house and they will be arrested if they do, this is fascist.

“This is not democratic, this is not freedom. Give people back their goddamn freedom!

“So the extension of the shelter-in-place or, frankly, I would call it, forcibly imprisoning people in their homes against all their constitutional rights, in my opinion, breaking people’s freedoms in ways that are horrible and wrong and not why people came to America or built this country.

“It will cause great harm, not just to Tesla, but to any companies.

“And while Tesla will weather the storm, there are many small companies that will not.”

Mr Musk then tweeted: “FREE AMERICA NOW”.

Obviously, Mr Musk’s tweets were slated by medical experts, with one medical experts, Eugene Gu, MD, responding on Twitter with basic facts.

Dr Gu said: “I’m not here to cancel or bully you. I just want to inform you and your audience why I believe stay-at-home orders are the right thing to do for the coronavirus pandemic. On April 16, around 5,000 people died from COVID19. Extrapolating that for a year is 1.8 million.

“And most of those deaths were from NYC. If this was nationwide without a lockdown, it would be much higher than 5K/day. But even if it stayed at that number, 1.8 million dwarfs heart disease (647,000) and cancer (609,000), which are the number 1 and 2 causes of death in the US.”

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Many people stated that the businessman was losing “followers and respect by the second”.

Another person said on Twitter in response to the free America tweet: “What a shame. Ending the lockdown in America early will only put lives in danger and overflow our medical facilities even more.

“I used to think you had the greater good of humanity in mind, not your own financial gain. I suppose I should have known better.”

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