Career
His work has prompted major public reforms, including a ban in 2005 of drug company payments to government scientists at the U.S. National Institutes of Health. Willman's investigative reports in the Los Angeles Times also led to the March 2000 safety withdrawal of Rezulin, a Type 2 Diabetes drug that grossed more than $2 billion in sales.
Earlier in his career, Willman covered local, state and national politics, including presidential campaigns in 1980, 1984 and 1988.
Willman has worked from Washington D.C., and throughout California. His investigative reports in the 1990s exposed defective construction within tunnels of the Los Angeles subway,[2][3][4] along with defective welds at the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum,[5] prompting structural overhauls.[6] Within the subway, sections of the tunnel walls had been built with concrete thinner than the required minimum of 12 inches. At the Coliseum, the faulty welds had helped support the facility's cantilevered press box, suspended over hundreds of spectator seats. All corrective subway repairs were ultimately made at the expense of the contractors responsible for the defective work, and leaders of both projects said the structures were safe.[7][8] He currently resides in Bethesda, Maryland.
Willman's 2011 book The Mirage Man: Bruce Ivins, the Anthrax Attacks, and America's Rush to War was published by Bantam Books and focuses on the 2001 anthrax letter attacks in the U.S. and the subsequent media coverage and FBI investigation.[9] In 2018, 20th Century Fox and film producer Steven Zaillian announced that they had bought the feature rights to The Mirage Man and were developing a movie based on it.[10]
Willman did a feature investigation piece for the British Medical Journal in 2023 entitled "The US quietly terminates a controversial $125m wildlife virus hunting programme amid safety fears".[11]
