Hah Hah Hah! No, David, I'm not any higher level of paranoid after my question. I already knew since a couple years back that as you mentioned, just like in a Hard Drive's case, a Flash Drive is also NOT 100% permanently wiped out after being formatted.
Back then I had bought 2 Flash Drives and they turned out to be very short life lemons. After the first one gave out, I contemplated sending it back to Amazon.com from where I bought it or to the manufacturer for my money back. But, either there on some Amazon.com info or through Googling I found out about that info regarding no such thing as a 100% permanent wipe out. So, I nixed the idea of sending my Flash Drives back to Amazon or to the manufacturer.
The only consolation was that I had bought them with a Gift Card I had won in a MyOpera Community contest. So I hadn't per se lost money out of my pocket.
Anyway, so regarding this thread ... considering the above info, I figured there would just be no actual case of a
100% EMPTY Flash Drive. I figured that unless that data written onto a Flash Drive for formatting purposes was somehow protected sort of in that method that a Factory Image partition in a Hard Drive is protected ... a supposed empty Flash Drive WOULD be susceptible to infection.
Well, flawed or not, that was my thinking.