Covid-19 remains a risk, warns Boris Johnson - BBC News
But the prime minister adds that the UK is better placed to tackle the disease as he outlines his winter plan.
During a press conference earlier today, Prof Jonathan Van-Tam, England's deputy chief medical officer, claimed that vaccines have “averted around 112,000 deaths” in England.

And the same figure was repeated by Prime Minister Boris Johnson at this afternoon's Covid briefing.

But this figure takes as its starting point a comparison with a situation without vaccines but also without any new lockdowns.

If we’d seen anything close to that many deaths, we almost certainly would have changed our behaviours and the government would have put us back into lockdown. That in turn would have reduced deaths significantly.

So it is arguably fairer to say that vaccines have saved us a choice between endless lockdowns and terrible numbers of deaths.

But it shouldn’t be surprising that a comparison against a world without more lockdowns gives this figure for England alone.

If the cases we’ve seen this year were still killing people at the rate they did in 2020, we would have seen many thousands of deaths.

And vaccines also slow the spread of the virus, preventing even more.