diff --git a/news/6728.bugfix b/news/6728.bugfix
deleted file mode 100644
index 792105ddb..000000000
--- a/news/6728.bugfix
+++ /dev/null
@@ -1 +0,0 @@
-Make vendored html5lib compatible with Python 3.9.
diff --git a/news/html5lib-collections-patch.vendor b/news/html5lib-collections-patch.vendor
new file mode 100644
index 000000000..de29b1f6b
--- /dev/null
+++ b/news/html5lib-collections-patch.vendor
@@ -0,0 +1 @@
+Patch vendored html5lib, to prefer using `collections.abc` where possible.
diff --git a/src/pip/_vendor/README.rst b/src/pip/_vendor/README.rst
index 8e9038ed7..539634204 100644
--- a/src/pip/_vendor/README.rst
+++ b/src/pip/_vendor/README.rst
@@ -99,7 +99,8 @@ Modifications
 * ``setuptools`` is completely stripped to only keep ``pkg_resources``
 * ``pkg_resources`` has been modified to import its dependencies from ``pip._vendor``
 * ``packaging`` has been modified to import its dependencies from ``pip._vendor``
-* ``html5lib`` has been modified to ``import six from pip._vendor``
+* ``html5lib`` has been modified to import six from ``pip._vendor`` and
+  to prefer importing from ``collections.abc`` instead of ``collections``.
 * ``CacheControl`` has been modified to import its dependencies from ``pip._vendor``
 * ``requests`` has been modified to import its other dependencies from ``pip._vendor``
   and to *not* load ``simplejson`` (all platforms) and ``pyopenssl`` (Windows).