"During the search for money, Bill Gates pushed Gilbert and Hill to partner with a big pharmaceutical company, and as a CEPI founder he had leverage. “We went to Oxford and said, you are doing brilliant work,” Gates recalled in a call with reporters in early June. “You really need to team up, and we told them a list of people to go and talk to.”
It was Gates that gave major funding to Oxford to develop the vaccine and then pushed Oxford to partner with AstraZeneca.
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2020-07-15/oxford-s-covid-19-vaccine-is-the-coronavirus-front-runner