After reading the whole article, I didn't see anything that "points away" from the lab leak theory, unless it's supposed to be this:

> “The connection between RaTG13, the Wuhan Institute of Virology and Sars-CoV-2 isn’t required any more,” says Robertson.

But it was never required, just possible (and perhaps plausible, according to many people).

I did, however, find lots of transparent attempts to throw mud at the lab leak hypothesis, like this little gem of spontaneous irrelevance:

> The resurgence of the lab leak theory – promulgated early last year by Donald Trump and his supporters, before being dismissed – has been fuelled by the...

The gist of the article seems not to be related to any "new studies", but rather this:

> This leaves the lab leak theory resting principally, for now, on unverified reports of three cases of respiratory illness among the WIV’s nearly 600 staff in November 2019, a winter month in Wuhan, and the fact that the institute took a database of viral genome sequences offline two months earlier – to protect it from hackers, they told WHO investigators.

Fine. But what does the alternative hypothesis rest on? The only claim they make on behalf of the natural origin is that it has happened before. Well guess what: this[1]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_laboratory_biosecurity...

The lab leak hypothesis can arise after pandemics because humans need an explanation to feel safe from the chaos of "nature (as) the biggest bio-terrorist". Coupled with the general poor science education, people soothe themselves with conspiracies. It's fine, so long as it doesn't get leveraged by empire for war against economic enemies.