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CNN’s Rene Marsh Demanding Advocating For Change After Her Son Dies From Pediatric Brain Cancer

Blake Vince Payne was only 2 years old.

Back in April, CNN Correspondent Rene Marsh’s 2-year-old son Blake Vince Payne died due to pediatric brain cancer. Marsh is now fighting back by spreading the word about pediatric cancer and demanding more research. 

Marsh, 39, told Yahoo! Life, “I want all this terrible pain that I'm feeling, for something positive to happen so that no other mother has to feel this. Because honestly, it is so bad that you would truly want to spare a stranger from it.” 

She has now launched the Blake Vince Payne Star fund to provide funding for research, “It's raising money in conjunction with the Pediatric Brain Tumor Foundation, which is a nonprofit and all of the money that we raise is going to fund researching this disease that stole Blake from me.”

She also wrote a children's book entitled The Miracle Workers: Boy vs. Beast, which will be released in the fall and all proceeds will go to the Blake Vince Payne Star Fund.

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In addition, Marsh started a petition to ask the Biden administration and Congress for a national plan to end pediatric cancer. The petition was before Congress on Sept. 24. 

Marsh spoke at the Childhood Cancer Summit, according to Yahoo! Life, and said about the petition, “I created it on my first mother's day without Blake. The whole mission behind the petition was to try to have some sort of document that people can support, so that you can quantify to the lawmakers that there is support amongst the American public for them to do something about this issue.”

Rene and her husband Kedric Payne welcomed baby Blake on March 14, 2019. By December of that year, he was diagnosed with pediatric brain cancer. Blake passed away on April 14, 2021.

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