This is the best article I've read on the Vaccine/Autism controversy. Some interesting points:
Research has soundly disproved the alleged connection, yet fears about vaccines continue to be a major risk to public health.
and
The CDC estimates that thanks to vaccines, we have reduced morbidity by 99 percent or more for smallpox, diphtheria, measles, polio, and rubella. Averaged over the course of the 20th century, these five diseases killed nearly 650,000 people annually. They now kill fewer than 100. That is not to say vaccines are perfectly safe; in rare cases they can cause serious, well-known adverse side effects. But what researchers consider unequivocally unsafe is to avoid them. As scientists at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health recently found while investigating whooping cough outbreaks in and around Michigan, “geographic pockets of vaccine exemptors pose a risk to the whole community.”
* I say debate with a grain of salt because there is no scientific basis for a debate
