Viagra is proving to be a miracle drug far beyond its ability to reinvigorate men's sex lives.  The latest miracle Viagra apparently performed is pulling back from the brink of death a woman who had been in a 28-day long COVID coma.

Viagra (AKA Sildenafil, its chemical name) was a 1989 Pfizer invention intended to treat heart-related chest pain.  By 1998, both the United States and the European Union approved it for medical use.  But nobody thinks of chest pain when he thinks of Viagra.  What people think of is the fact that it is a miracle drug for men suffering from erectile dysfunction.

That's not all that Viagra does, though.  Because it works on the arterial system, it can also affect pulmonary arterial hypertension, Raynaud's phenomenon (a potentially dangerous circulatory problem), altitude sickness, and other types of heart disease.  Some athletes also take it off-label, claiming that, because it expands their blood vessels, it adds to their aerobic capacity.  There are also some indications that it helps women who experience sexual dysfunction.

Image: Viagra tablet from Audrey disse.  CC BY-SA 3.0.

In addition to those useful functions, there are now indications that the little blue pill can help treat COVID.  This makes sense, given that COVID has proven to attack the pulmonary arterial system.  In England, Viagra may well have saved the life of an asthmatic nurse:

A nurse who spent 28 days in a Covid coma fighting for her life has been saved after medics gave her Viagra as part of an experimental treatment regime .

Double-jabbed asthmatic mother-of-two Monica Almeida, 37, from Gainsborough, Lincolnshire, was admitted to hospital on November 9 after testing positive for coronavirus on October 31.

She was moved to intensive care a week later before doctors put her into an induced coma on November 16.

Mrs Almeida says they were just three days away from having her ventilator turned off when her condition started to improve and she woke up on December 14.

When she woke up doctors at Lincoln County Hospital revealed they had given her a large dose of viagra as part of an experimental treatment regime that she agreed to before going into a coma.

The erectile dysfunction drug enables greater blood flow to all areas of the body by relaxing the walls of blood vessels, and Mrs Almeida says it caused her condition to improve in just a week and the level of oxygen she needed to drop by half as it opened up her airways.

Both our government and medical establishment, with their blind fealty to a vaccine that doesn't prevent COVID, are determined to block all treatments, especially early intervention.  However, the fact remains that there are apparently a lot of ordinary medicines that can prevent COVID deaths.

Now we can add Viagra to a list headed by hydroxychloroquine and ivermectin.  It sure would be nice if they were properly studied on patients in the early phases of COVID, long before the patients need extreme measures.