I agree that it probaby shouldn't be mandatory until the long term safety studies are done. There are some underway at the moment.

I am not sure that making things like this mandatory is helpful anyway as it just seems to get some people's hackles up. Vaccines are not mandatory in the UK, but most people get the recommended ones done anyway - at least until the media whips up a scare story out of nothing.

Re autism levels rising. Although autism diagnosis levels are rising, there is some evidence that most if not all of this is down to better detection and changing diagnostic criteria. I recently read a study which looked at a random sample of kids and screened them for autism. They repeated this several years later using the exact same diagnostic criteria as the first time, and found no increase.